The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
It’s not, though. There are extremes in all human thought patterns, and some have extreme low empathy (sociopaths), whilst others have extreme high empathy (which can also be detrimental).
All humans are somewhere on that curve, but when we give people with very low empathy a lot of power, very bad things happen.
My point was that these extremes aren’t necessarily ‘mental illness’ – they’re natural extremes, but giving them a lot of power is absolutely detrimental to society, because they can’t understand how the rest of us work, and they need to inflict their unnecessary and unconventional rules on the rest of us.
Well I suppose the fact that I disagree is entirely besides the point, as either way we can trust that a critical mass of people will abuse a power hierarchy. It doesn’t really matter if, as I think, the hierarchy created them or if, as you think, they already exist and are merely drawn to it. A hierarchy will abuse it’s power.
Chicken and egg feedback loop.