"Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof"
About this Quote
Millett’s line lands like a dare: if psychiatry wants the authority of medicine, it should have to meet medicine’s evidentiary burden. The opening jab - “Everybody believes” - isn’t admiration, it’s social diagnosis. Psychiatry, she implies, has become a civic religion: widely trusted, vaguely benevolent, insulated from the kind of scrutiny we demand elsewhere. “For our own good” carries the sting of paternalism, the phrase historically used to justify everything from censorship to forced treatment.
Her insistence on “physical proof” is less naive positivism than strategy. Millett is writing from a world in which “mental illness” has often functioned as a label that follows power: women, queer people, dissidents, the inconveniently angry. In that context, demanding bodily evidence is a way to expose how quickly psychiatric language can slide into social control. If the diagnostic category can’t be anchored to something testable, then it can be wielded as a moral verdict dressed up as care.
The subtext is autobiographical and political. Millett was famously subjected to coercive psychiatric intervention, and her feminism targeted the institutions that translate nonconformity into pathology. So the quote isn’t a wholesale denial of suffering; it’s an attack on psychiatry’s claim to objectivity and its ability to turn “help” into enforcement.
What makes it work is the tight rhetorical trap: either psychiatry is a hard science, accountable to proof, or it’s a soft authority that should be treated with skepticism - especially when it has the power to confine, medicate, and discredit.
Her insistence on “physical proof” is less naive positivism than strategy. Millett is writing from a world in which “mental illness” has often functioned as a label that follows power: women, queer people, dissidents, the inconveniently angry. In that context, demanding bodily evidence is a way to expose how quickly psychiatric language can slide into social control. If the diagnostic category can’t be anchored to something testable, then it can be wielded as a moral verdict dressed up as care.
The subtext is autobiographical and political. Millett was famously subjected to coercive psychiatric intervention, and her feminism targeted the institutions that translate nonconformity into pathology. So the quote isn’t a wholesale denial of suffering; it’s an attack on psychiatry’s claim to objectivity and its ability to turn “help” into enforcement.
What makes it work is the tight rhetorical trap: either psychiatry is a hard science, accountable to proof, or it’s a soft authority that should be treated with skepticism - especially when it has the power to confine, medicate, and discredit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mental Health |
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