Talk:Military psychiatry

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Some Democratic Concerns About Psychiatry in a Military Context
Military Psychiatry will seem to quite a few people to be slightly alarming given that Psychiatry is NOT a watertight science (say, like Medical sciences). And objective tests are not used by Psychiatry that often (ie: such as blood tests or brain scans - given that even such objective tests can give wrong results, the point made here becomes more pertinent). Further, Psychiatry has been prone to misuses and abuses in the past (say, in relation to the detention of political protestors or other opponents) and would seem to remove a certain level of objectivity from Military life (in particular, whether a particular soldier has a particular level of military merit). Please read on.

Of course, I have no specific examples to give (nor would you expect me to be in a position to give them due to 'Confidentiality' and the type of Secrecy that seems to follow Psychiatrists wherever they go). But the use of Psychiatry within the military context raises the distinct, distasteful, and dangerous possibility that a Military officer can be detained without any objective evidence that he is suffering from Mental Health problems or Disease, or has carried out any wrong-doing whatsoever. This is clearly a bad situation to allow, and might even cost lives.

It it not my argument that Psychiatry is incapable of providing useful help (whether it be medical, or therapy based), but rather that Psychiatric power has a tendency to increase by leaps and bounds (say, that Approved Mental Health Professionals can authorise that certain individuals be locked up without any HARD evidence whatsoever, and certainly not a criminal standard of evidence). If the misuse of power that is documented within the Political abuse of psychiatry article were to occur within a military context, it is clear to even someone with a partial degree of common sense that the results would be a disaster to any state founded upon reason. Officers could be detained or locked away when they are needed and able to perform in the field, careers could be ruined, political expediency could trump military requirements 'in the field' - especially if Psychiatric treatment were to become politicised, extremely perverse relationships could form between Military Psychiatrists and Officers - with Officers being afraid to voice certain concerns for fear that this might reflect negatively upon their Psychiatric evaluations, and possibly telling Military Psychiatrists what they think the Psychiatrists need to hear to provide adequate Psychiatric evaluations, etc.... Just a little bit of this would interfere with the effectiveness of Military Organisation, with the potential that preventable deaths would possibly occur. Clearly, the only thing that Military Psychiatry (under such circumstances) does is to select for the most politically-savvy officers RATHER than ensure that those with the greatest military ability receive due recognition. It would be nothing more than a convoluted social-political-IQ test with those officers who know what is most likely to satisfy a Psychiatrist being the ones to receive positive Psychiatric evaluations.

Clearly, military psychiatry is likely to be far more bureaucratic than civilian psychiatry - with the result that getting at the truth of a sequence of events is likely to be more difficult for someone who has worked in the military than for someone who has dealt with Psychiatry in a civilian context. One wonders how often soldiers are provided with a copy of their Psychiatric evaluations, together with whether they are allowed the opportunity to respond to those evaluations in their own words.

It is not my contention that the treatment that Psychiatrists offer is useless (for instance, certain drugs do scientifically have certain effects BUT whether the theories and methods that Psychiatry uses provides the correct use of those drugs is very likely to be disputed), but that Psychiatry, not being a science, should not be used even if it seems to ameliorate medical problems (a sticking plaster might help with a graised knee, but not with a deep cut wound that exposes internal organs - not merely due to the severity, but also due to the sophisticated type of surgical knowledge which would be needed to ameliorate the deep cut wound). Further, Psychiatry seems too politicised to be deemed to be an objective medical science, and so should be treated cautiously for this reason.

In relation to the issue of Psychiatry, I would recommend http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ Which outlines typical fallacies, some of which are used by Psychiatrists, in both everyday political discourse and also within Psychiatry as a whole. I could say a lot more, BUT I am a little disturbed by the spectre of soldiers with advanced weaponry having to dance through the far from objective world of Psychiatry (mind you, these days, quite a bit of what passes for Science can be argued to be far from objective).

The essential criticism of Psychiatry is that it is TOO EASILY POLITICISED and, therefore, stifles OBJECTIVE considerations of the military (assuming, of course, that we have the free will with which to make informed decisions of OBJECTIVE information, But I digress...). Psychiatrists use advanced pseudo-scientific language which is profoundly dangerous PRECISELY because it appears plausible to the uneducated layman (or, possibly, even the politician). Just because something APPEARS to be true, does not imply that it IS true (though, it is accepted that sometimes we have to make decisions as such due to limited cognitive resources or limited information). The awareness of at least some of Nizkor's fallacies (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/) reduces the potential for fallacious conclusions. ASavantDude (talk) 16:10, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

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What are "Psychiatry wars"?
if I think of "In Sthsth it says" - Oh What? and "We must do Sthsth" - Eh Thanks a lot. or, "Eh no. you really can't eat it!" then this is PSYCHIATRY WARS. Time: 1992-2028.

thanks so much. Wikistallion (talk) 21:39, 27 July 2020 (UTC)