Anyu

“This view of psychiary [as a genuine scientific activity] is premised on the idea that modern drugs are disease- or symptom-specific treatments; that they work by reversing some or all of an underlying physical pathology. It is the idea of the specificity of action that makes drug treatment appear to be a therapeutic, medical enterprise. If, in contrast, modern psychiatric treatments are not specific, if they act merely by inducing psychoactive effects that suppress or contain psychiatric distress and problematic behaviours, then psychiatry has not moved far from its historical roots as a [...] medicalized form of social control.”
― Joanna Moncrieff, De-Medicalizing Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition

“For the diagnostic categories for which drugs are far and away the first-line form of treatment, such as the ‘mood disorders’, ‘eating disorders’, ‘psychotic disorders’ and ‘anxiety disorders’, an average of 88% of all DSM-IV panel members had drug company financial ties.”
― James Davies, Cracked: The Unhappy Truth about Psychiatry

“Technology tries to prevent us from asking deeper questions. The megatechnology society believes that there is a technological solution to every problem. This would be correct only if the world were a machine.”
― Stephanie Mills, Turning Away from Technology

“It flashed through her like the sudden apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure [...] and for the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires,—of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. [...] She sat in the deepening twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness; and in the ardor of new discovery, renunciation seemed to her an entrance into that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had not perceived—how could she until she had lived longer?—the inmost truth of the old monk’s outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss