By Andrew Klein  1^st December 2025

When we speak of control in the modern world, we often point to surveillance or police. But the most powerful form of control is one that convinces the individual that the problem lies not in the world, but within their own mind. This is the legacy of psychiatry—a field that did not discover mental illness so much as invent a framework for its categorization, transforming the vast, complex spectrum of human experience into a ledger of disorders to be managed.

The Freudian Foundation: Pathologizing the Interior

The project began in earnest with Sigmund Freud. While his theories of the unconscious were revolutionary, their ultimate effect was to medicalize the soul. Human conflict, desire, trauma, and even creativity were reinterpreted as symptoms of hidden pathological processes. The “talking cure” was not a dialogue between equals, but an excavation led by an expert who held the only key to interpretation. This established the fundamental power dynamic: the psychiatrist as the decoder of a broken self, and the patient as a flawed text to be corrected.

The DSM: The Bible of a Secular Inquisition

If Freud provided the theology, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) became its bible. It is the ultimate “tick-box” approach to humanity. Disorders are defined not by biological tests, but by committees voting on clusters of behaviours.

· The Illusion of Science: The DSM creates a façade of medical rigor where none exists. There are no blood tests, no brain scans, no objective biomarkers for the vast majority of its listed disorders. As Dr. Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, stated, the DSM’s diagnoses are based purely on symptom clusters, lacking scientific validity. The NIMH subsequently pivoted away from DSM categories in its research for this reason.

· The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Grief becomes “Major Depressive Disorder.” Shyness becomes “Social Anxiety Disorder.” A child’s boredom in school becomes “ADHD.” This ever-expanding catalogue pathologizes normal human reactions to an often-traumatic world. The message is clear: if you are suffering, you are sick, and the solution is not social or political change, but personal chemical adjustment.

The Engine of Extraction: Chemical and Surgical Intervention

The primary “treatment” flowing from this model is pharmacological. The human being is reduced to a “chemical imbalance,” a theory that, despite its popular currency, has never been scientifically proven.

· The Impact: We now have generations of citizens on powerful psychoactive drugs—SSRIs, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines—whose long-term effects are often devastating (emotional blunting, metabolic damage, sexual dysfunction, and often, permanent dependence).

· The Financial Cost: The global psychotropic drugs market is projected to exceed $100 billion annually. This is not a healthcare system; it is a highly profitable delivery system for patented chemicals. The goal is not a cure, but lifelong management.

· The Return of Surgical Control: While lobotomies are (mostly) a relic of the past, their spirit lives on in procedures like Deep Brain Stimulation and the exploration of psychosurgery for “treatment-resistant” depression. The logic remains: if the mind is malfunctioning, alter the physical brain to force compliance.

The Neoliberal Alliance: A Perfect Symbiosis

Psychiatry did not just evolve; it was reshaped to serve a specific economic order. Neoliberalism, with its demands for productivity, resilience, and self-optimization, found a perfect partner in a psychiatry that locates pathology in the individual.

· Pathologizing Dissent: Despair at a meaningless job is “burnout.” Anger at systemic injustice is “intermittent explosive disorder.” The psychiatric model becomes a tool for social control, diagnosing the failure to cope with a pathological system as a personal mental failing.

· Enabling Euthanasia for the “Unproductive”: In countries with legalized euthanasia, we now see the “right to die” being extended to those with mental illnesses. People who are poor, lonely, and have found no relief from a conveyor belt of failed treatments are being offered death as the ultimate “solution.” This is the logical endpoint of a system that sees a human who cannot be made productive as a candidate for elimination. In Canada, the expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) to include those solely with mental illness has sparked intense ethical debate on this very point.

A History of Imperialistic Ambition

The American Psychiatric Association’s campaign in the early 20th century to establish its authority is a matter of public record. In the 1920s, as described in historian Edward Shorter’s “A History of Psychiatry,” the APA and influential psychiatrists like Adolf Meyer actively worked to infiltrate all aspects of social life. They pushed for:

· Mental hygiene campaigns in schools.

· Influence over the legal system (insanity defences).

· Consultation on child-rearing and family life.

  Their goal was to establish psychiatry as the ultimate arbiter of normalcy across the entire society.

The Modern Scourge: Digital Psychiatry

In Australia, the rise of for-profit online mental health platforms epitomizes this extractive model.

· Services like BetterHelp and Talkspace offer cut-rate, text-based therapy with often unqualified practitioners.

· They commodify human connection, turning therapy into a subscription service while mining sensitive patient data.

· They undermine quality, relational care, offering a quick fix that often fails to address root causes, ensuring the customer remains a recurring revenue stream.

Conclusion: The Self-Licking Ice Cream

The psychiatric system is a perfect, closed loop—a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

1. It defines the terms of what is “normal.”

2. It pathologizes any deviation from that norm.

3. It sells the “cures” for the pathologies it has invented.

4. When the cures fail or create new problems, it invents new diagnoses and treatments.

Who benefits? The pharmaceutical industry, the insurance companies, the private clinic owners, and the professional class that administers the system.

Who pays the price? The individual, whose suffering is stripped of its meaning and context, and who is left with a prescription, a label, and the quiet conviction that they are, at their core, broken.

We must reclaim our souls from this system. True healing begins not with a pill, but with the understanding that to be distressed in a sick world is not a sign of illness, but a sign of humanity.

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Sources:

· Shorter, E. (1997). A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac.

· Whitaker, R. (2010). Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.

· Moncrieff, J. (2007). The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment.

· Thomas Insel, “Transforming Diagnosis”, NIMH Director’s Blog, 2013.

· Kirkey, S. (2023). “Canada’s plan to extend medically assisted dying to the mentally ill is ‘unethical,’ experts warn.” National Post.