Johnson cries out in frustration at being
unsuccessful in persuading
his colleagues to stop mistreating psychiatric patients. He laments
that even
David
Healy who has lectured and written extensively against psychiatric
drugs betrays dissident psychiatrists and damaged patients by endorsing
electroshock.
Johnson provides neither new evidence nor personal experience to
support his position against drugs. Instead he refers to books by
Whitaker
and
Breggin –
indeed highly recommendable.
But Johnson must not have read Breggin’s book very well, because
Breggin rejects the idea of mental illness. Johnson doesn’t. He states
“Don’t try and define what mental health is. There is no need to.” Yet
he
does try to define mental illness as “once the mind no
longer relates to
the reality of its owner.”
Referring to it by various terms, including “mental illhealth” (sic),
he states that it is always caused by fear. In infancy these fears are
justified. A baby is dependent on adults for survival. In adulthood
they are “obsolete” leading to “a pathology
of denial” he posits.
Like Breggin, Johnson places the onus of people’s sanity on their
parents:
- “…every sufferer from uncontrolled irrational
emotions is
looking for an ideal parent to sort things out, rather as their
original parent somehow failed to do,”
- “Parenting keeps infants
alive, and adults insane.”
Although he vehemently rejects all biomedical treatments for mental
illness (drugs and electroshock), he continually speaks of it in
medical lingo, using terms as
symptoms,
treatment, and
medical
healing. His book is rich with analogies between somatic and
psychiatric medicine.
He calls the mind “the most important organ in the body.”
- “Fear plays exactly the same role in mental health
as pain does in
physical health”
he writes, though most of his analogies are more
lyrical:
- “The mind [is] the one organ in the body which has
function
without form, physiology without anatomy”
- “…plaster casts support the
bones, but the healing is done by the living leg – apply emotional
support in an appropriate way, and all minds heal.”
- “[Human beings]
… have first to rinse out all the bits of fear which seem to breed
ubiquitously, like so many bacteria.”
It makes stirring reading, but
not sense.
He satirizes the DSM thus:
“…this is how [the DSM-IV system] would
apply to leg pain. …your doctor says – “you’ve got a broken leg. I’m
not the least interested in finding out what led up to this. In fact we
have recently adopted a significantly novel approach – we’ve decided to
be entirely neutral as to whichever causative factor might have led to
this break.”
Humorous as this sounds, it is unpersuasive. A physician can set a
broken leg without knowing what broke it. The need to know "what led up
to this" regarding non-somatic complaints is precisely because no break
or other anomaly can be identified.
Johnson’s method of treating mental illness is, according to him,
supporting the person emotionally by talking to him. Like so many
writers on both sides of the psychiatric divide, bio versus babble, he
portrays
his method of treatment as being spectacularly
effective. He
even claims to have used it successfully while employed at a prison – a
job he admits to having attained through nepotism, though
he couldn’t keep it for long. To his credit he does insist that
treatment
should be voluntary.
How talk can do such a spectacular trick he does not say. Instead he
provides examples of lengthy conversations he allegedly had
with patients. Such cases must be either fabricated or gross
violations of the patients’ privacy which neither changing their names
nor
obtaining their consent can justify. Since he says that these are
transcripts from tapes, it’s probably the latter. Nevertheless, what
his fail-proof method is and how it can be learned by others remains
obscure.
What
is truly spectacular about Johnson is his illogic. No
doubt some
people do cope with “obsolete fears” whether or not he has hit on
a method for making the “symptoms evaporate.” But surely it is absurd
to assume the same cause for whatever brings millions of people in
contact with psychiatrists. Such sweeping generalization disregards the
diversity of
humankind. And how does Johnson explain psychiatric intervention with
people who have until then functioned perfectly well and normally all
their lives, or conversely, people who have functioned poorly since
infancy when these alleged fears were not yet obsolete? Does Johnson
reject psychiatric intervention concerning people who have legitimate
fears
or problems not
stemming from fear? Does he send such clients away?
Yet more examples of his illogic:
- he admits that the mind is intangible, "you have no
fingers to poke" it,
and at the same time repeatedly calls it an organ of the body;
- he
identifies himself as a member of a profession – psychiatry – and at
the same claims to reject all of that profession’s dogmas;
- he
recognizes that this profession is an “inhumane branch of medical
practice” that has destroyed millions of lives and at the same time
he calls it “the Queen of Medical Specialties” and the profession he loves.
He even advises the reader to “overcome the
fear of psychiatry.”
In summary, this is an excellent book as long as it is judged by its
cover.
