XIIth World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics (9-13 th October, Dublin)

sligo | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Saturday October 02, 2004 00:09 by s.fleming

The medicalisation of human behaviour as disease or illness must be challenged

I would like to draw the Indymedia reader’s attention to an event taking place in Dublin between the 9-13 th October, the XIIth World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics. The subject is an issue which should concern everyone. The inherent danger I believe is that this Congress is perpetuating the myth that genes play a significant role in a person’s behaviour, especially in relation to so-called mental illness. This is despite the fact that no substantial scientific evidence has ever been found to prove this.

It needs to be understood that even if genes did play a part in predisposing people to certain behaviours, the influence of societal/ environmental factors and the exercise of one’s own volition are certainly much more significant. People’s behaviour is not therefore at the mercy of their genes. This congress needs to understand how greater attention to these factors along with genuine counseling and caring supportive services would go much further in treating people with ‘psychiatric illness’.

Tragically instead ‘patients’ are given a psychiatric label and harmful neuroleptic drugs. We should not forget that the dark shadow of eugenics is being cast on this congress. The history of psychiatric genetics can be traced to eugenics, the worst manifestation of which was Nazi Germany. A fact hardly ever recognised is that between 1939-1941, 70,000-80,000 ‘mental patients’ were murdered in gas chambers in ‘mental institutions’ in Germany. Their lives were seen as not being worthy of living.

The medicalisation of human behaviour as disease or illness must be challenged. It negates understanding of people’s life circumstances and what the great dissident psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has termed ‘problems of living’. A further concern of this congress is the fact that it is entirely sponsored by pharmaceutical companies.

There is too close a relationship between psychiatry and these companies. This needs to change along with the emergence of a new, radical and compassionate psychiatry which doesn’t reduce those deemed ‘mentally ill’ to that of needing their alleged ‘faulty’ brain chemistry corrected.