'What is the "advanced psychiatric society"?' (This being a question asked me by Nanette Miles)

The question is appropriate; and goes a long way to show how things are not generally self-evident.
Let me put it this way: let's build a model of society- consisting of a quantity of separate horizontal strata; one is p.e. the police/behavior control stratum; it comprises persons (policemen, judges, legislators and so on), institutions, rules, ideologies, buildings and so forth.
Another stratum: financial/economic: factories, shops, marketing agencies, logistics, planners- and workmen, white-collars, managers, banks and so forth.
Another: political level- with projections on the inside (domestic policy) and the outside (foreign policy).
Another: military level.
Another: science and development.
Another: the health system.
..........


All these strata are distinct, and have peculiarities which can be analyzed both synchronically (present state) and diachronically (as they change in time); they are distinct, but embricated, with multiple interactions and feedback loops. Together they constitute our living environment and our social system.
After World War Two many scholars described the emergence ot significant transformations away from the classical capitalistical system (or free-market economy); a greater state intervention, greater social security, a whole array of new consumption objects (from cars to refrigerators to TV sets ...) which greatly changed the basic lifestyle; also, there was a process of economic concentration- multinationals, chainstores, big government; all of this was variously named: affluent society, consumeristic society, late capitalism, advanced industrial society...
Ok, to this term corresponds 'advanced psychiatric society'- which is in fact another of the strata I mentioned before: not just asylums for the insane, as once upon a time, but a diffused throughout variety of public and private institutions, offering a wide range of services: from classical psychotherapy to psychopharmaca, from walk-in clinics to self awareness groups to esoteric therapies of various kinds (going from total quakery to extreme seriousness and import). One relevant thing is that in many of these sub-sectors there are very strong power gradients (between who cures and who is cured, beween who teaches and who learns, etc); and, secondly, that very often the result (if not always the aim) is reduction of independent thought and behavior and of creativity. The whole system in fact somewhat overlaps with the police system, for example, in so far as it helps things just keep moving the ordinary way, without too many tumults and improperties- which has been called a function of social control, or normalization.
This psychiatric system is certainly not totalizing and all-controlling; nonetheless its basic constituents (ego psychology, drug industries, the American Psychiatric Association with its world-wide diffused Bible- the DSM, "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders") highly determine the whole field of possibilities and imaginings.


A very crude description of this system can be found in an essay by John Zerzan I have published on the blog some time ago. A much more refined analysis is in a book by Roland Castel and others titled in the original just 'La societè psychiatrique avancè', and in English 'The psychiatric society'; it is now 30 years old- so that much is not comprised, and it is also a bit too sociologistic and determistic (the 'plans of social capital' go a long way to dominating and subsuming everything); anyway it is fairly complete and detailed.


Well, here stops part one of my reply; the next part- when I or someone else will be able to write it- should deal with what lies beyond the advanced psychiatric society. Which is what I am working on in this blog and in my praxis.  GC

                (from Cronenberg's 'ExistenZ')