The policies and practices of American psychiatry are oppressive

The author argues that psychiatry is not a medical specialty but an instrument for the social control of people whose ideas, actions, values, and life-styles threaten or disrupt established power relationships within families, communities, or society. Psychiatry's instruments for social control are involuntary incarceration and so-called treatment in facilities in which inmates are brutalized, harassed, neglected, and humiliated. The major somatic psychiatric treatments--drugs, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and lobotomy--have produced an epidemic of neurological and brain dysfunction, such as tardive dyskinesia, associated with neuroleptic drugs, and memory impairment, associated with ECT. The author condemns the freezing experiments conducted on psychiatric inmates in the United States and on concentration-camp inmates in Germany during the 1940s.