“Potent new neurochemical weapons that are used to produce new forms of death” is what Hatch calls psychiatric drugs. They are inflicted on people in prisons, the military, immigrant detention centers, nursing homes, foster care, and even schools “for the purpose of carrying out state violence and repression.” Just how vastly this happens he documents in as far as possible given the sloppy record-keeping.
Hatch is not the first. Peter Breggin, not mentioned in his book, already in a 1991 publication called psychiatric drugging “murder of the soul.” Thomas Szasz, mentioned briefly, had as long ago as the 1950s identified the then new neuroleptics (later to be wrongly dubbed antipsychotics) as insidious because they place restraints *inside* a person rather than *on* him.
Like so many authors who write otherwise excellent books, Hatch falls into occasional lapses of logic. The worst is his insistence that it is medically inappropriate to prescribe psychiatric drugs to people who have no psychiatric diagnosis. Herewith he implies that prescribing those drugs to people who do have such a diagnosis is medically proper. In spite of his sharp condemnation of psychiatric drugs as necrotizing, he laments that minority prisoners are undertreated for their mental health issues, where, in his view, the drugs would be appropriate.
But what is mental health? A psychiatric diagnosis is but a subjective attribution. Twice he mentions the DSM, the catalogue of psychiatric diagnoses used around the world, without any mention of the vast body of published criticism of it. If prescribing psychiatric drugs to incarcerated people who have no psychiatric diagnosis were outlawed, the only thing that would change is that many more of these people would be given diagnoses. Psychiatric diagnoses are employed to deprive people of liberty just as psychiatric drugs are employed to deprive people of their psychic lives.
Mental suffering is real, Hatch argues. Of course it is. Certainly in the institutions he describes one wonders how anyone could *not* suffer mentally, anymore than one could *not* suffer physically while being beaten. But incarcerated or not, necrotizing drugs can hardly be a remedy. At best they temporarily mask the evidence of suffering at dire detriment to long-term health both mental and physical. Hatch is right that “the legal and cultural classification of psychotropic drugs as therapeutic medicines has made it difficult for us to understand how psychotropics are used to create new forms of social, psychic, and sexual death.” The presence or absence of a psychiatric diagnoses makes no difference to that outcome, as survivors of psychiatry have been shouting for decades.
Hatch's other disappointing lapse of logic is using the word “capitalist” apparently in the meaning of greedy. See my comments on this usage in my book reviews of Lenzer and Burstow. As Marcia Angell points out, pharmaceutical companies are precisely not capitalist, as they exist by the grace of industry-friendly laws and regulation, publicly funded research, monopoly rights, protectionism, and tax breaks. Their best client, the biggest single purchaser of prescription drugs, agrees Hatch with Angell although he doesn't mention her, is government.
So what can be done about psychiatric drugging?
Hatch expresses doubt that the so-called (leftist) antipsychiatrists of the sixties had “much effect on public understanding or state policy.” My late friend Szasz, whom Hatch wrongly brackets with them, would surely agree. But his powerlessness to spread his message was not because it is wrong. It is because, as Szasz himself frequently pointed out, his message is inconvenient for the public. People, including those in power, **want** to believe in psychiatry.
Hatch continues, “If you want to reform an institution, you want the people in power at the table with the reformers. … If, on the contrary, you aim to dismantle psychiatry and the custodial power of the state altogether, you want to burn the table down … That is what I have tried to accomplish with this book.” Indeed, Szasz made clear in all of his writing that psychiatry cannot be reformed, it must be abolished, like slavery. That can be accomplished only by limiting state power. But Szasz never had any illusion that writing a book could accomplish it. If it could, surely the over thirty of them and hundreds of articles that he wrote would have succeeded. Szasz would have been delighted if Hatch succeeds where he, Szasz, did not.
Towards the end Hatch engages in an interesting discussion of corporations. He could have added that corporations, legislated into existence not by capitalism but by state power, are like Frankensteins that now dominate their makers.
In summary, Hatch has written a great book but it will not bring us any closer to justice just as the other thousands of fine books on this subject haven't. The scourge of psychiatric drugs will remain with us as long as the public at large clings to the superstition that they can be beneficial.
This review was written by a board member of MeTZelf.
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