| ThePhanastasio |
12-05-2011 06:42 PM |
Psychiatry is the sort of thing that ultimately "means well", but there is so much still unknown about the human mind that it certainly has a habit of generalizing and lumping things into neat, tidy boxes. A lot of times, that's not the case. New disorders are discovered all the time - it branches out and diagnoses are steadily made more succinct, but it's still got a long way to go, ultimately.
I'd imagine that the practice came into play as a way to try to understand why undesirables, e.g. rapists and murderers existed, and to try to find a way to treat the more severe issues. It ultimately may have spun out of control, taking differences in behavior which are predominately harmless, such as ADD, and trying to make everyone more similar - which is kind of a terrifying notion.
As I said, it has come a long way - certain medications do well with certain disorders. When drugs were developed for illnesses such as schizophrenia, many people who would less than a century ago have spent their entire lives in a psychiatric institution where lobotomies and things of the sort were considered treatment were able to leave, living more or less regular lives.
I think the whole point is probably, at this point, to attempt to allow people to exist normally in society, although individuality seems progressively to be more and more frowned upon. With so much unknown about how the human mind really works, their idea of normalcy may be so far from correct that they could be doing more harm than good.
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