Psychiatry

The psi and caduceus, a symbol of Psychiatry.

Psychiatry is a medical discipline that studies the causes and essence of mental illness, their manifestations, the course, methods of their treatment and prevention, and the system of organization of assistance to patients. The main method of psychiatry is clinical research. In addition, modern Psychiatry uses neurophysiological, biochemical, immunological, genetic, psychological, epidemiological, and other methods.

Under capitalism, psychiatry is distorted and otherwise abused to comply with the demands of the private pharmaceutical industry and chauvinistic cultural practices.

Political abuse

United States

In the United States during the 20th century, excessive diagnoses of schizophrenia were given to women who did not comply with the patriarchal social expectations of the time. Similarly, during the civil rights movement, Black Americans were disproportionally diagnosed with mental illnesses, their desire for equality being perceived as "delusions".

Nazi Germany

In Hitlerite Germany, psychiatry was abused to provide a pseudo-scientific justification for the mass extermination of mentally ill patients and racial "undesirables" during the Holocaust.

Treatment

Imprisonment of mental patients

Prior to the middle of the 20th century, most mental patients where institutionalized in lunatic asylums where patients had to suffer with poor living conditions, lack of hygiene, overcrowding,, ill-treatment and abuse of patients. Although many lunatic asylums where closed down in Western countries in the 1950s and 1960s, they were de-facto replaced by prison incarceration. In countries like the United States, people with mental illnesses are severely over-represented, with the number of individuals with severe mental illness in American prisons was 3 times higher than the number in psychiatric hospitals.