From the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard
"Mental Health professionals should not help to reinforce the myth that “pain can be magickcd away” by prescription pads, especially when that pain goes hand in hand with unfavourable social circumstances like unemployment. Tranquillisers will not only dampen down the pain but also the anger “which . . . is the most appropriate and healthy response to being deprived of the right to work through no fault of your own". This “dampened down anger” can “go sour” and lead to increases in depression, suicide and anxiety states.If the medical profession . . . allow themselves to continue to be used as controllers of pain which should appropriately and healthily be expressed in anger, if they dampen down the energy which a healthy person puts into changing an unsatisfactory environment, they are betraying their professional integrity, they are whoring for a collapsing late capitalist society.We do not need any more research into the effect on mental health of poverty, injustice and lack of social opportunity; we now need the will to do something about those effects and conditions, we need “the courage to stand up and be counted, not to fit humans to the shape of the world, but to shape the world for humans.
1 comment:
It's funny: I can't remember what I had for breakfast two days ago but I can remember an article by Kay Carmichael that appeared in an early 80s issue of the now defunct New Society magazine about growing up in the Independent Labour Party in Glasgow in the 40s and 50s.
I would have read the article in maybe 88/89, but it remains vivid to this day. I know why I still remember it: a teenage interest in the history of Red Clydeside and the ILP was my gateway drug into revolutionary socialist politics. Throw in a mention of Shettleston, and I was probably rolling up my sleeve and finding a vein. (Poor taste? Too much? Probably.)
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