The dark arts of psychology and psychiatry

Well, this is a damning article… Any rebuttal? :slight_smile:

Progressive Liberal elites proposed, as the cure for social disharmony, the state care of the mentally ill and the broad extension of the newly formed discipline of psychiatry. The broad application of state-funded care was a small price to pay for the real victory that they achieved: the creation and dissemination of a discourse that medicalized social problems, framing them as individual and medical rather than collective and political.

I think this applies much more broadly than psychiatry and social problems - there are many diseases of moderninity (analogous to diseases of affluence?) and the general approach seems to be treating them as medical problems. I am not an expert on this, but my impression is that these occur because human biology is poorly adapted for many aspects of the modern human environment - having a personality that is poorly adjusted to modern society is just a specific case of this.

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Well the entire post-modern movement was born out of dissatisfaction with modernity. :slight_smile:

So we have:

  • modernity reformers (habermas et. al.)

  • post-modern critics (foucault et. al)

  • ‘secular’ traditionalists (theosophy, new spiritual movements)

  • ‘religious’ traditionalists (alasdair macintyre, t.j winter, et. al.)

And many more. :slight_smile: