"When I say a man is schizophrenic, he is schizophrenic; just as if I say an ashtray is schizophrenic, it is schizophrenic." -Colonel-Doctor Daniel L. Lunts of the Serbsky Institute, Moscow--in another place, another era. Quoted from book KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (Bantam books, 1974, by John Barron), Chapter V: "How to Run A Tyranny."
So another culture has been there, done that, perhaps even in conjunction with the same technology or some variant of it.
Other quotes from this book (same chapter):
"...Solzhenitsyn says: 'The commitment of free-thinking people to psychiatric hospitals is spiritual murder, it is another version of the gas chamber, but even more cruel: The sufferings of those being killed are more painful and more prolonged.' "
"...By labeling a dissenter insane, the KGB creates at least some doubt about the validity of his or her complaints. By subjecting some political dissenters to drug tortures in the asylums and inflicting on them permanent psychological or physiological damage, the KGB doubtless discourages dissent."
I used to read this book in the early stages of my dilemma, particularly after having undergone unusually cruel treatment, and reflect that it was like looking into a sort of frightening sociological mirror. Just substitute a more contemporary acronym for the letters "KGB."
Is this what our own society (supposed to be a pillar of democracy) has degenerated into?
Historically, the medical profession is interfaced with the public in such a position that societies that do employ torture and other totalitarian methods find it convenient to conscript it into service.
The old truism, that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it, certainly applies here. I like this version of that truism, stated eloquently by Winston Churchill (House of Commons, May 2, 1935):
“When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”
Postscript (10-10-16):
It is hardly surprising that psychiatry is able to provide a cover for these crimes. It likes to masquerade as a hard science akin to physical science or some other branches of medicine and biology, with a lot of official sounding language and terminology for various categories of disease. But in many cases the causality is not as well defined and determinate, like a microbe that can be examined under a microscope. One major critic of the scientific foundations of psychiatry was himself a psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas Szasz. See Wikipedia entry at link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz. There are even more scathing criticisms at
http://www.cchr.org/ and http://www.cchr.org/museum.html%23/museum/intro#/museum/intro.
That is not to say that society does not need means of dealing with dangerous persons who may have very severe deviations from the norm.
