what does the medical model of 'mental illness' accomplish?

1. it silences people - when someone's feelings, opinions or perspectives can be attributed to a disease process, people no longer feel any obligation to listen, much less attempt to understand. with time this will cause a person to lose all trust in their own perceptions and the evidence of their own senses.

2. it is used to rationalize brutal human rights abuses including imprisonment without trial or charge, and forced ingestion of highly addictive, health-destroying chemical substances along with barbaric physical tortures such as 'seclusion' (solitary confinement) or electroconvulsive 'therapy', among others.

3. it can (and often does) lead to a life sentence of poverty, isolation, prejudice, revolving-door repeat imprisonments, and generally compromised physical health leading often to a premature demise.

4. it leads to being designated by definition as a second-class citizen, the object of scorn and irrational and unjustifiable fear along with condescension and other assaults on mind and spirit that no 'anti-stigma' initiative can ever hope to overcome.

let's be explicitly clear about some things here:

these human issues (and i will be the first to affirm they are very real and often angonizingly painful) are not medical in origin - their roots are social and political. only approaches based on this reality have any hope of succeeding.

these human issues do not result from some form of individual sickness or personal defect - they are systemic in origin and pervasive in their occurrence. in this world which is so brutal to the human spirit, no one gets away completely clean (although some people are better at concealing what is happening to them).

everyone has the capacity for madness (for lack of a better term) within themselves. the only variable is exactly what will trigger it. what seems completely inconsequential for one person might prove to be completely devastating for someone else. this does not mean such people have some form of 'biological predisposition' to 'mental illness'. everyone has their own trigger. what exactly this might be is as unique and individual to each of us as our fingerprints. while there are some commonalities no two people will be affected in the same way by a specific event or set of circumstances.

psychiatric labels are not medical ' diagnoses' - they are accusations for which society has spelled out a clear policy of brutal punishments for whenever they manifest. the medical model is merely a smokescreen couched in false compassion used for obfuscating this uncomfortable truth. and most people are guilty of helping to maintain this brutal reality. this has to stop - NOW.