The Popular Opinion of Laymen on Psychiatry Is Atrocious
Like all other ideological arms of bourgeois respectability and the commercialisation of human connection, psychiatry and the larger therapeutic-industrial complex are, at large, uncritically regarded as some impartial force of social progress and ‘benevolence’ (i.e., the necrophilic compulsion of capitalist bureaucracies to flatten human experience, inherently transgressive, into the arborescent, faux-utilitarian, manageable obedience of docile bodies: in their eyes, a good desirer is a dead desirer). We must not forget that the collective consciousness in l’Occident spectaculaire still sees nothing wrong with the Enlightenment-rational métarécit; sees nothing wrong in the metaphysics of classificatory positivism and said positivism’s life-destroying effects on society and culture; sees nothing wrong in a repressive state apparatus that — on not more than the whims of unexamined technocracy — signs away, for those it exiles from its socioemotional normativity, the privilege to think and connect with the outside world — all while enjoying the psychic power of phallic militarism and the societal ubiquity of Big Brother.