The pathetic survivors
Finally, I can be told that since the mental health professions are inherently corrupt, I shouldn’t have considered even anti-psychiatrists but only survivor groups. Common sense tells us that, unlike the professionals who are part of the system, in self-help groups we will find the much sought after help. But let’s remember what happened with those filmmakers when I said that the Alcoholics Anonymous therapies were skin deep because they omitted the issue of parental abuse. This omission is endemic in self-help groups and even in less superficial associations than AA and its countless imitations of the twelve steps. For example, in the texts that are circulated in a group called Co-counselling I was stunned by the absolute omission of the role that parents play in the emotional problems of their children. Nothing is more alien from the ideology of this group than to fight for the legislative milestones of those countries that have prohibited corporal punishment of children. And exactly the same can be said for any other self-help group. Needless to say, not attacking the root cause is, as I told the AA believer who went mad at me, an epidermal remedy.
Laing was a philosopher of disturbed minds. But philosophical sophistication often serves as a smokescreen to hide the mistakes of a thinker. In psychiatric survivor circles it is common to hear that Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America, published in 2001, is considered the most educational book against psychiatry ever written. Whitaker definitely gets off the philosophical tower of Foucault, Szasz, and Laing. But in his book, Whitaker doesn’t say a word about whether parents could be the agents of trauma. Mad in America’s deficiency was exposed when a guest in the guest house I lived in, read some passages from the book in my library and came across a favourite Whitaker quote among psychiatrists themselves: ‘Little is known about what causes schizophrenia’. My friend repeated this psychiatric slogan, omitting my footnote: ‘It bothers me that, after quoting Modrow, Whitaker didn’t want to see that the cause of the insanity has been known for decades’. And that’s the ‘best critical book’ on psychiatry, written not by a mental health professional but by an acclaimed journalist.
A word now about the most structured organisation of survivors of psychiatry: Mind Freedom International, which has invited Whitaker to its events (I don’t take into account the activism of the Church of Scientology against psychiatry because it’s mixed with Scientology quackery). This organisation publishes a magazine that bears the same name, Mind Freedom. In its winter 2002 issue, which features a photograph of Breggin on the cover, the magazine listed dozens of books critical of the psychiatric profession. But in the review of Modrow’s book it omitted to mention his central thesis: extremely abusive parents can cause ‘schizophrenia’ in the child. What has Modrow opined about such omission? It is pertinent to point out that, although I have consulted the Mind Freedom page many times, I have never come across a phrase that affirms that parental abuse may be involved in the child’s crisis. This is surprising when you consider that David Oaks, the director of the organisation, had a psychotic breakdown when he was in his twenties; and it is also surprising because a grassroots movement like Mind Freedom doesn’t have to comply with the political correctness of the most academic authors (the contributors to Simon’s journal for example). When I confronted Oaks about this omission, like Breggin he hid behind a wall of silence.
I must say that one of the aspects of Mind Freedom that caught my attention is its insistence on speaking of insanity as something to be proud of: similar to, say, the sexual identity advocated in the so-called gay movement. In fact, from the correspondence he sends me, I realised that Oaks is very interested in having the idea of ‘Mad Pride’ promulgated, including parades, imitating those of ‘Gay Pride’. This is a grotesque idealisation: we can already imagine Modrow feeling proud in 1960 because he was John the Baptist! With honourable exceptions the survivors of psychiatry, including those who demonstrate on the street, appear pathetic. In some internet reviews I recommended books by Szasz, Simon’s journal that Breggin originally created, Whitaker’s Mad in America, and Mind Freedom’s web page. Now I’m not so sure of the wisdom of these recommendations. None of them have dared to see the most terrible event in life: the maddening panic of a child assaulted at home. It is a splendid irony that, like their psychiatric foes, parental toxicity is a taboo subject for many anti-psychiatrists.
In How to Murder Your Child’s Soul I tried to cut a weed at ground level. But the extirpation that I do here reaches a root untouched in my previous book. In our culture it is strictly forbidden to get to the root of evil in the world. Breggin has written that we have to wait for the moment when critics of psychiatry are able to galvanise public opinion. He doesn’t realise that for that moment to come, Miller’s revolution in psychology must first be consolidated. Psychiatry doesn’t re-victimise children who are beaten at home by accident. It does it out of necessity. It is just one of the most recent institutions of an ancient social heritage that recreates evil in each generation. Psychiatry is part of an ancient cultural fabric: from the biblical ‘wise’ Solomon who advises beating the child, to the ‘educator’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau who abandoned his babies in an orphanage. Laing himself abused his family terribly. What people like Breggin don’t want to understand is that it is impossible to convince society of the falsehood of psychiatry if his editors don’t even tolerate the word ‘trauma’ in the manuscripts that come to them. Some of that trauma can be glimpsed in the TV talk show subculture with all the simplicity and vulgarity that these shows represent. But there is no chair in any university in the world that formally addresses the subject.
This is the most astonishing fact that I have come across in Alice Miller’s work.