The GP sent a psychiatrist to see the boy who offered him a place in the local mental hospital. Foolishly the boy saw this as a way out of his misery, not understanding the truly appalling position he was in.
Psychiatrists pathologise. Give them a patient they will provide a diagnosis. They see other people, but not themselves, as teeming with instabilities and personality disorders. Anything that points to the unusual, anyone outside the norm, must be suffering from one mental illness or another.
They inhabit something of a fantasy world. They are unaccountable, their disgnosis rarely challenged.
Also, the boy's diagnosis was the consequence of social prejudice. The boy's claims to erudition, his interest in writing and ambitions to write were seen as clearly abnormal considering the family he came from. While in the hospital all sorts of problems were assigned to him by one of the psychiatrists.
On one occasion, he sat before a whole group of varied professionals, nurses, doctors and social workers. According to his testimony he had no idea the danger he was in. Everything he said, he considered to have been twisted from normal to abnormal.
Another psychiatrist he saw couldn't speak English and misunderstood much of what he said.
Everything was written down unchallenged-every falsehood and mistake, filed away and never challenged nor corrected. Written records play a huge part in the process of solidifying psychiatric fantasy.
Parents:
The parents' opinions were sought-to psychiatrists parents are/were solid, caring, trustworthy. They did not abuse and if they did, it was the victims of their abuse who were/are diagnosed. It is always the victims, not the aggressors. They must have been very frightened at first of being found out, but no doubt were quickly relieved to discover psychiatrists' gullibility, even if this was constructed from arrogence and lack of accountability. What webs his parents must have spun! What lies they must have told!
The case was sewn up! The boy was mentally ill! Psychiatrists would have supplied the reasons. He was put on drugs.
A month later, feeling defeated, he left the hospital and went back to his parents. He had achieved nothing. Now he was officially mad, matters grew worse. A few days after arriving back home, he began to feel strange. He became excrutiatingly affected by sunlight, unable to pass windows, often doubled up with fear. He remembered one time seeing his father watching him. The boy knew he was in immense trouble thrown back into the snakes' pit, and overwhelmed by strange thoughts and feelings.
Hearing this, I realised the boy had been affected by the drugs given to him in hospital. As he talked of following black-outs and disturbed ramblings, this confirmed it for me. After all, he was only 16.
No comments:
Post a Comment