Looping effect: People get caught in self fulfilling stories about illness. We make ourselves in our own scientific image of the kinds of people it is possible to be.
“Psychiatrists have become ‘medical intronauts’, we are exploring the inner space of man.”
Lodge lawyer: “Isn’t it correct that one of the benefits of psychotherapy is trying to make persons look at themselves?”
A: “To make a person look at himself when he is in no condition to do so can be a very dangerous thing to do.”
“To contain costs, insurance companies require doctors to submit treatment plans and show evidence that patients are making measurable progress. Long elegant narrative of patient’s struggles were replaced by checklist of symptoms.”
“Mental healthcare had to be treated as a commodity, rather than as a collaboration.”
The doctor–patient relationship, which the Lodge viewed as an enchanted bond—a cure for loneliness—was remade by the language of corporate culture. Psychiatrists became “providers” and patients were “consumers” -
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- whose suffering was summarized with diagnoses from the DSM. “Madness has become an industrialized product to be managed efficiently and rationally in a timely manner,” wrote the anthropologist Alistair Donald,
in an essay called “The Wal-Marting of American Psychiatry.” “The real patient has been replaced by behavioral descriptions and so has become unknown.”
紀實報導的文體很讚的部分是,會聽到其他相關人的角度。Naomi的丈夫認為妻子應該受處罰。倖存的兒子說自己不怪母親:“I was never angry at her, because she explained to me that when you are sick you do things you would not normally do—you are not you.”
The sociologist Alain Ehrenberg writes that long-term treatment with antidepressants has become a cure for people who feel inadequate. The drugs create a “paradoxical situation, in which the medication is invested with magical powers while the pathology becomes chronic.”