Paradigms of Social Justice and Obligation

IV. Uncommon or disapproved behavior as mental sickness/disease

    The utility of the drug-abusing pregnant woman in justifying a whole new venture into coercive possibilities is aided by another prevalent attitude: the woman who would do such a horrendous thing to her offspring must be sick. And the sick obviously need to be treated. Modern psychiatric institutions explicitly justify themselves in terms of preemptive justice. The several hundred thousand "insane" are "involuntarily committed" to mental prisons because they might harm society or themselves. [In 1980, ~525,000 were admitted, with ~255,000 institutionalized on average. US Stat.Ab.] Thomas Szasz persuasively argued against psychiatric slavery for decades.[Szasz] The abuse of mental prisoners in these institutions exceeds even that in criminal prisons. The outrage against Soviet psychiatric abuse is hypocrisy at best. Institutional populations have greatly fallen in the past few decades only because psychochemical constraints have replaced physical ones [see graph].

    The disease paradigm of abnormal behavior has ancient roots in superstition. The convenient connotations brought with such a paradigm are 1) the disease is deserved somehow by bad thoughts or (other) behavior, 2) (if that is denied, then) the diseased did not really choose to be sick, and therefore will not mind being treated, for of course 3) disease must be treated, 4) disease is typically "inherited" (his race is to fault) or contagious (his associates are likely needful of treatment), and 5) the diseased are stigmatized.

    The belief in these disease states is so compelling as to easily flutter thru any thicket of facts. It does not matter if the condition the disease "explains" does not even exist. Exemplary in this regard is addiction - a more thoroughly contrived and expedient myth could not be found. [Peele] Nor does it matter that any coercion "because of" addiction will do more harm than the self-abuse. [Davenport] The easy metaphorical "explanation" provided by disease or addiction provides even easier excuses for the treated and treatment, distracting from underlying causes. Even if an addict recants his sin and blames the devilish drug he willingly took, intolerance is no less to blame for the dimensions of the drug problem. The disease paradigm is only the most obvious manifestation of the attitude that abnormal behavior and belief are irrational and dangerous, and growing coercive possibilities need no longer tolerate them.

    References to the subconscious often excuse social coercion. As Thomas Szasz demonstrates, labeling people as unconscious and irresponsible is the primary excuse for everything from psychiatric abuses to over-criminalization. The psychoanalytic tradition, for instance, purportedly reveals the subconscious motivations responsible for "mental problems and behavioral aberrations". Szasz himself explains though that it is the fictional distinction between implications of consciousness and subconsciousness that have such horrendous social consequences. Subconscious motivations are not bad, or irrational, or deserving of coercion. They are above all else not the idiosyncrasy of the insane. The subconscious hypothesis applies to all humans, equally, or it applies to none.