I am reading an interesting book, that is when I can get my head round reading, I have poor concentration skills right now so can manage about a couple or three pages at a time. It’s about madness and the rise of psychiatry and is called “Madmen” by Roy Porter. I haven’t got very far into it but contrary to popular opinion, if you believe Porter’s synthesis, before the Nineteenth century mad folks weren’t treated too badly in some instances. He writes about church houses in France and asylums in England which were run humanely, naturally many of these were run for the richer clientèle but even, if I am to understand him correctly, mad people from the poorer sections of society could be treated with kindness. Of course it wasn’t all rosy and I have yet to come onto the more extreme tales of treatment and maltreatment.
It would seem to me that there may be an argument that psychiatry is bad for mad people and once mad people were entrusted to medicine it all got very complicated. I know there are people who argue that psychiatry is a method of social control and I think there is something in that argument but I am not sure if it is all that simple or straight forward. The rise of “Radical Psychiatry” and more people focussed care which looks holistically at the madness in us, however, can only be a good thing.
Posted by p3bbles 