I Need The Eggs: A Psychiatry Blog

How can one consent to treatment if one is mentally ill? Consent is a hot topic in psychiatric theory and practice.   Those on the left, if you like, the more radical critical psychiatry fraternity, suggest that psychiatric practice is often coercive.   The more conservative side of psychiatry tend to believe psychiatry is about care and not about power relations. The relationship between a psychiatrist and patient is inherently a power relationship.   The psychiatrist diagnoses, treats and monitors the patient.   The patient's agency or choice is limited to agreeing to treatment or not.   Importantly, patients (in theory) do have this choice.  However, most mental illness is defined by not being of sound mind so is that choice then informed and free? Certainly in the past incarceration against one's will was more prevalent.   With the asylum closures (at least partly instigated by the anti-psychiatry movement) in Europe and North America in the 1960s onwards and a move t

This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Woody Allen in Annie Hall. What if our concept of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bi-polar, personality disorder and so on as types of mental illness was all wrong?  An influential group of thinkers in the 1960s and 70s, roundly described as the Anti-psychiatry school thought this was the case.  Were they completely mad? I once commented on a below the line section of an article in the Guardian that mental illness, as we know it, does not exist.   I added caveats explaining my position but I was bombarded with people telling me I was full of crap, didn't understand depression, how they certainly experienced mental illness so how can it not exist?  To suggest mental illness doesn't exist makes people mad (in the American