I'll take a stab at it...
Both view victim as having a mental illness or disorder.
Both incarcerate people against their will- based on the observations of another.
Psych Hospitals on the decline. Teen Warehouses taking up the slack.
One subjects inmates to isolation chambers, psych meds, straight jackets, physical and chemical restraints, labotomies, ECT.
The other subjects inmates to BM techniques- the lessor of the evils.
The former ran by degreed professionals, the latter by zealots.
This came today. Thought it was relevant:
Conditioning refers to the shaping of our attitudes, tendencies and behaviors
so that we become willing to go along with the program. It is malevolent when it reflects
a profound distrust of human nature, systematically disconnecting us from our natural
knowing and from the ability to think and act independently. A conditioned individual is
incapable of thinking for themselves, of questioning authority, of following his or her
own heart. Accurate information is crucial to conscious living, and I hope that this
information will help shake up and loosen ignorance related to our mental health system.
"The Dawning of all great truths on the consciousness of humanity has usually
to pass -- says Tolstoy -- through three characteristic stages. The first is: "This is so
foolish that it is not worth thinking about." The second: "This is immoral and contrary to
religion." The third: "Oh! This is so well known that it is not worth talking about." (6)
I am not sure about the dawning of great untruths, but the tenets of biopsychiatry are all too solidified into Tolstoy's third phase. Challenges and critiques tend to be met with the first and second reactions, condemned as foolish or immoral. I envision a time when our society will say things like, "It is well accepted that caring for our children is not primarily a medical problem, and so obviously wrong to give them toxic drugs to control their behavior."
DISOBEYING AUTHORITY -> TERROR.
An act against conditioned patterning evokes a feeling memory that "something bad is going to happen." As a child, your survival quite literally depended on the goodwill of your parents. On an emotional level, the feeling remains that your life (job, money, status, worth) depends on obedience to authority. A key tenet of mental health liberation is that psychiatric oppression is about suppression of individual differences, that uniqueness is punished, sacrificed on the altar of conformity. While it is true that differences are not tolerated, there is a deeper dynamic. What really cannot be tolerated is anxiety, the feeling associated with memory of terror.
