Mental Health Has Identity Problem

The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell (1953)

"...the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology.... The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician’s paradise.”

Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953); page 30.) Cited by Lewis Albert Alesen, Mental Robots (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1960); page 26.

"Proletarian hegemony can be carried out through the Soviets [a hierarchy of councils from the Supreme Soviet at the top down to the small community soviets (groups) that monitored the peasants through the dialectic process]."

"The institutions in socialist society which act as the facilitators between the public and the private realms are the Soviets. They are the congresses [diverse groups], which facilitate the debate [dialoguing to consensus] of universal problems [social issues] in the context of the everyday.” The Process of Democratization by Georg Lukacs (SUNY Press, Albany, 1991. First published in Hungary, 1988); page 25, 46.

"Mental Health Has Identity Problem" Bremerton Sun, 2-28-73 (UPI)

"Because of its own 'confusion and muddle' over who is the patient, psychiatric science is having troubles in training young professionals in how to treat mental health problems on a community-wide basis.

"According to two of its teachers, the most troublesome conflict among teachers and trainers is where to intervene with therapeutic help. If the individual is the patient, he should get the therapy. But what if the patient is the community or a segment of it?

“In that case the therapeutic attention should be directed at the real illness, the social injustices afflicting many person. And the intervention should be through 'the strategies and tactics of political power' aimed at bringing about sweeping changes in society.

“Drs. C. Brooks Brenneis and Dori Laub, psychiatry teachers at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn., discussed the problems the concepts of community psychiatry have brought to psychiatric science in the journal of the American Psychiatric Association. It is now a major psychiatric endeavor, subsidized by millions in federal mental health funds and concentrated in big city ghettos and other depressed areas. The original purpose was to make psychiatric therapy available on a mass basis....

"The new or 'radical' psychiatry evolved by some teachers and trainees, takes community psychiatry to mean 'community activity,' Drs. Brenneis and Laub said. It is the 'activist approach' to mental health and is based on 'concern for the social causes of the patients' distress and a highly partisan, perhaps romantic empathy for the patient as victim.'

These therapists not only join, but lead their patients in direct action against social ills and 'if a certain amount of activity seems ineffective, double that amount should be more effective. To provide theory for this approach, psychiatric illness in itself is denied.'...”