SNOOPY is suddenly gripped by a wave of anxiety. But it鈥檚 OK, he realises,
there鈥檚 a simple way to feel better鈥攍ie with your head in your water dish.
鈥淭his is hushed up, of course, because it would completely ruin the drug
companies,鈥� says Snoopy.
When one of the speakers at the Mind Aid conference showed the Snoopy strip,
the audience laughed. I cringed. I鈥檇 gone to New York City not knowing what to
expect, but intrigued by the claim that neuroscientists and critics of
psychiatry would be debating the biomedical model of mental illness.
Given that in the US some 4 per cent of schoolchildren take Ritalin and
millions of adults take antidepressants daily, it seemed a good time to start
asking how far social problems are being turned into medical problems. But only
about twenty other people turned up, and they seemed to have already made up
their minds. For them, the idea that mental illness is a 鈥渂rain disease鈥� is a
lie perpetrated by uncaring psychiatrists colluding with greedy drugs
manufacturers to exert social control over 鈥渦nacceptable鈥� behaviours. It鈥檚 a
view that dates back to such sixties dissidents as Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing,
who argued that schizophrenia and depression are social labels and not medical
diagnoses. So it鈥檚 not schizophrenic delusions you get, but 鈥渟piritual
惫颈蝉颈辞苍蝉鈥�.
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The few medical researchers who鈥檇 come to the conference clearly hadn鈥檛
cottoned on to the Mind Aid agenda. 鈥淭his conference was a setup,鈥� said Eliot
Gardner of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, who鈥檇 just
presented a lecture arguing passionately that drug addiction was down to
biological susceptibility, not moral weakness. To the audience鈥檚 delight, the
next speaker, Stanton Peele, ridiculed the role of biology in mental illness,
urging that the disease model is an excuse for not being able to understand
human behaviours.
And that set the pattern. Scientific research followed by polemic against the
biological model, followed by wild clapping from the tiny audience. In between
talks, members of the audience would approach scientists with harrowing tales of
misdiagnosis and mistreatment by their psychiatrists. It was easy to see why
they believed psychiatric drugs were evil: now they were drug-free and doing
fine. But as Daniel Javitt of the Nathans Kline Institute in New York state
gently pointed out to one woman, many people wouldn鈥檛 do fine. 鈥淭here are ones
left behind,鈥� Javitt said sadly.
I saw one of them later that day, on the streets outside the conference. He
was unkempt and talking wildly to himself. I moved to the other side of the
sidewalk. I have a hard time buying that this obviously schizophrenic man was
experiencing valuable 鈥渟piritual 惫颈蝉颈辞苍蝉鈥�. On the other hand, I know someone
whose doctor offered her antidepressants as if her husband鈥檚 recent death was
some curable disease.
The Mind Aid organisers have a good point: psychiatry is bound up with our
social and cultural values. After all, it wasn鈥檛 too long ago that homosexuality
was deemed a mental illness. So how do we decide who needs to take psychotropic
drugs?
I wish more people had come to the Mind Aid conference to honestly debate
these issues and work out how to preserve health without compromising
humanity.