CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Mental Illness May be a Myth, but Trauma is a Societal Crisis

“In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.” -Thomas Szasz

“In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.”

In the beginning, there were shamans; wild eyed wiseman communing with the ancestors, drawing down the moon, and swapping genders like loincloths. They were strange and mystical creatures born with a downright uncanny connection to forces beyond the veil of the seen world and every village had one.

Then progress began and spiritual diversity got in the way of profit. Villages became cities, tribes became governments, and individuals became citizens. A handful of shamans were rebranded as prophets and messiahs, but they ultimately proved too unruly to govern while they were still alive. So, a few dead messiahs were chosen and churches were built around their carefully edited texts while the rest of the shamanic class were simply deemed heretics and slaughtered.

As progress continued and the cities became states and the states became empires, even religion became inconvenient, reduced to nothing but an anesthetic relic. The heretics were deemed lunatics and asylums were built, first to simply contain them and then to “treat” them. A new religion was established around such treatments. A secular temple preaching chemical subjugation and societal assimilation as its dogma. They called this church Psychiatry, the Clinic was its God, and its Devil was a mysterious affliction known as Mental Illness.

This is the history of people like me, the history of madness, and it is a history that the various organizations behind Mental Health Awareness Month would really prefer you weren’t made aware of. That’s because mental illness, at least as they define it, is a myth, and these same organizations are a part of a multibillion-dollar industry built to perpetuate this myth for prestige and profit.

Thankfully, a handful of disgruntled........

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