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This article's a bit dire on re-reading, but I still think it contains some interesting ideas. (My 2003 comments are in brackets) I'm trying to write a sort of improved version, to be called 'Alternative biological models of mental distress' but it's very difficult to do that kind of research or writing when you're homeless, so it may take some time. In the mean time:

Madness and Psychiatry

The aim of electrical and chemical techniques in psychiatry is to replace a particular kind of conscious thought (madness) with another kind of conscious thought (normality) without having to think about the emotionally threatening world view of madness which might challenge through philosophical reason the world view of the psychiatrist in a way that he couldn't cope with. To avoid misunderstanding, I want to make clear that I regard as philosophical reason any attempt to passionately ask questions about the nature of our being in the world, especially in a way that doesn't fit into a framework of conventional knowledge, and risks emotional and physical danger to those who ask. I feel that conventional academic philosophy with its split between reason and emotion is morally dead. Thus to me a housewife in a council flat who has a thought disorder caused by questioning the horror of her life in ways that cause her to be rejected and is called mad, is involved in the dangerous process of reason.

The argument between psychiatry and those opposed to it is often about whether madness is a often about whether the cause of madness is 'biological' or 'social'. Talking about the cause of madness as being 'biological' or 'social' means that you think that madness can be defined at this level. (This bit is a mess - needs re-doing sometime) Logically, if madness is defined either only socially or biologically, then cause and treatment is only sought at a social or biolgical level. The argument of this article is that any mental process can be looked at either socially or biologically, although one is not reduceable to the other and that equally any cause and any treatment are equally social and biological. To use a biological argument without placing it in a social context means that you cannot understand anything and leads to psychiatry's role in attempting to destroy people's problems by destroying brain processes. (I've tried to re-write the above paragraph a bit, but it really does need re-doing)

Psychiatry sees madness as 'mental illness' and anti-psychiatrists object to madness being seen in this way, and this is worth examining. If someone is sick with cancer or tuberculosis, both sick person and the healer agree about the sickness and the need to be healed. With madness, the mad person and the psychiatrist often do not agree about anything, and the psychiatrist produces the well known double bind argument that the mad person doesn't know that they're mad because they are mad - meaning that they don't know what is going on in their own heads but the psychiatrist does. This ludicrous denial of people's ability to perceive themselves arises from the way that the term madness is used to deny or take away people's responsibility for their own lives. In fact, both the mad person and the psychiatrist know perfectly well what is going on and the mad person is perfectly aware of the way they are behaving and their own perfectly understandable terror of the situation which is leading them to behave in ways called mad, although they might not call them that. However, in the same way that a sick person agrees about the need to be healed, someone who is in distress wants things to change for the better, and mad just means freaked out by a terrifying vision of the world. They may need love and care to their brain in the form of a hug, someone to talk to, or help overthrowing the oppression of their family, their boss or their government. Interestingly, as the whole idea of a mind/body division breaks down, it is increasingly being realised especially in alternative medicine that ordinary bodily illnesses are a response to a stressful social situation and that medicine should not be divorced from politics. One of the contradictions of psychiatry is that the biological basis of 'mental illness' is perceived through a social expression of the brain, about which another brain makes a social judgement, distinguishing 'sane' and 'insane' behaviour yet mental illness is somehow not social. (This is all over the place!)

The brain is a very delicate dynamic energy system, receiving chemical energy in the form of food and expending it in nervous impulses, and ultimately heat and waste. The very delicate and complex network of trillions of chemical equilibria all existing in relation to one another in the 'metabolic web' and passing bond energy to each other, form the physical structure of meaning. If chemical or electrical energy is put into this structure which it is not designed to recognise i.e. it is neither meaning nor food, it will only obliterate meaning in the brain. With electricity in particular it is common knowledge, as any biologist will confirm, that large quantities are destructive to tissue - although psychiatrists seek to ignore this common sense fact. (New) A model of biological organisation which has come to be accepted in recent years is 'autopoiesis' - self-creating and self organising networks, wherein every biological component - in a cell, in an organism, in a society is in embedded in a web of feedback relationships with other components which together maintain and replicate the unit. The biological network, be it cell or organism interacts with the external world by incorporating anything new (eg food, information) into its existing organisation. However the electrical and chemical assaults of psychiatry are destructive of biological organisation.(Oh that'll do for now - back to old) John Friedburg, a Canadian psychiatrist who was sacked for his opposition to ECT and the author of 'Shock Treatment is Bad for your brain' and Peter Breggin, the author of 'Electroshock, its brain disabling effects' have documented the massive research evidence showing the destructive effects of ECT and the attempts by psychiatry to pretend this evidence does not exist. This research shows break-down of the blood/brain barrier (the brain's chemical screening system) and destruction of irreplaceable nerve cells on a very large scale. Blood vessels constrict stopping blood flow and causing oxygen starvation. Dr Karl Pribram, one of the leading figures in neuropsychology, has commented "I'd rather have a small lobotomy than a series of electro convulsive shocks - I just know what the brain looks like after a series of shocks - and it's not very pleasant to look at.

We know subjectively that someone has a problem by observing or listening to them. Anything we choose to call a problem has a specific set of electrochemical configurations, insofar as any state that anyone is in at any time has a particular set of electrochemical configurations, but it is we who define it as a problem or give it a name. We do not have an electron microscope capable of seeing every detail of a living brain and extracting some meaningful information about a problem within it that is expressed through language. However, we do not have to; the 'electrochemical' problem is translated into sound or action, which we are genetically programmed to understand. So the only way to address the problematical electrochemical configuration, the only one specific to it, is through talking and listening to the person. Chemicals coming from outside into the brain can be divided by their function into two kinds. There are those that contribute to, or enhance the existing organisation of the brain, where the brain organises these random heterogenous molecules into its sets of electrochemical networks that comprise the identity and personality of the individual. Then there are those which chemically overcome and disorganise the genetically centered organisation, randomising the chemistry of the brain, destroying the meaning and hence the person.

One of the interesting consequences of what I am saying is that the arguments can fall within the medical model; you can talk about it being more 'scientific' to 'treat' someone who is freaked out or mad, with warmth, sympathy and respect, for example by giving them a hug, than by trying to destroy their minds with electricity and psychotropic drugs.

One of the principles of how the brain works is that of active perception. This means that the brain does not simply respond to the great mass of information from the five senses, as that amount of information would be so large as to be unusable, but instead subjects it to an organising process which is selective as to what information it uses and how it generalises it. How we perceive the outside world determines what our idea of external reality is. People who have gone mad often perceive things differently, which is reflected, of course, in their brain physiology, but there is no reason to suggest that their subjectivity is less valid than ours, which is conditioned to perceive things in a 'normal' way.

Psychiatry's object is to destroy meaning that is subversive to the social order in the same way that the state uses censorship or banning literature when it has no reply to the criticism of reason. Psychiatrists largely characterise madness as non-understandable and irrational, which is a reflection of their own irrationality and refusal to deal with reason which they finds politically and emotionally threatening. This may not of course be obvious when the clinically cold, inhuman psychiatrist is confronted with a jabbering wreck of a human being, but that person has indeed good reason to be terrified. If what that person has to say about the world and themselves - they might 'choose to be' God and therefore hold themselves responsible for the tragic situation of the world (which was the situation with someone I used to know) is examined, we will find that they have come to these conclusions by a reasoning process. We may disagree with it and find it as frightening as the person concerned, but we can confront and reason with the person concerned - madness is very philosophical - instead of trying to avoid these issues by destroying the person concerned when we don't want to understand them. Even when people come out with what seems to be disconnected gibberish, this is because they are terrified of how they will be treated, and if one listens carefully enough for long enough it is possible to put a coherent chain of thought together, and if people know that someone is making an effort to understand them and has no intention of harming them, they will calm down. Implicit in all this, of course, is the idea that we do not know beforehand who is correct about the world, and maybe we have things to learn from each other.

It is my belief that psychiatrists try to classify people in different 'mentally ill' categories as a means of externalising problems they have themselves and can't cope with. They try to 'abolish' the problems because they are alienated and dehumanised and either incapable of understanding another human being in distress or simply afraid, and repressing that fear instead of admitting it. In a mental hospital there are two kinds of people with problems, the first group trying to face them and the second group trying to repress them and destroy them in the externalised other if they can't be ignored.

Incidently I do not pretend that I am not afraid when I am in the presence of someone who is called mad, or that I have all the answers. But I respect that person's right to be in a state of 'madness' even though I might not understand them, or not agree with what they are saying.

I see madness as a political/biological revolt against repressive normality, which is a system of fear and conformity where people are afraid to think or behave differently. Psychiatry is a way of terrorising people back into a normality where they won't revolt against an oppressive system of social and economic relationships. A period of madness can offer people insight into their problems and ours; problems that ECT or drugs repress or destroy; destroying the person by destroying their problems. If they are not destroyed but remain unsolved, they will continue to mess up the person and she or he may well become mad again. If the person is not hospitalised, this period will be very difficult, terrifying and exhausting for all the people involved in the situation and may well bring about the potential for madness in all of us, causing a lot of fear. Such a situation requires courage and the support of a caring and tolerant community.