"Psychiatry causes so much death"
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A sentence this blunt is meant to detonate. Millett isn’t offering a careful epidemiological claim; she’s naming psychiatry as an institution of social control and daring the listener to feel the violence she believes polite language has sanitized. “Causes” assigns agency, not accident. “So much” refuses the comfort of “rare harms.” “Death” collapses a spectrum of damage into the ultimate verdict: not merely misdiagnosis or overmedication, but the extinguishing of lives, selves, and futures.
The context matters: Millett was a feminist activist who wrote against the patriarchal scaffolding of “normality,” and she spoke from a period when women, queer people, dissidents, and the merely inconvenient were routinely pathologized. Psychiatry’s mid-century toolkit could include forced hospitalization, electroshock, heavy sedation, and diagnostic labels that punished nonconformity as illness. Even when it didn’t kill directly, Millett implies, it could drive people toward suicide, shorten lives through iatrogenic harm, or erase them socially through confinement and stigma.
The subtext is also strategic: by using mortality language, she yanks psychiatry out of the realm of benevolent expertise and into the moral category reserved for war, prisons, and state violence. It’s a rhetorical reversal of the clinical gaze. The profession that claims to prevent self-harm is accused of manufacturing it.
That’s why the line works: it’s not trying to win a seminar debate. It’s trying to make reform impossible to postpone by treating psychiatric harm as an urgent, body-count reality rather than a regrettable side effect of care.
The context matters: Millett was a feminist activist who wrote against the patriarchal scaffolding of “normality,” and she spoke from a period when women, queer people, dissidents, and the merely inconvenient were routinely pathologized. Psychiatry’s mid-century toolkit could include forced hospitalization, electroshock, heavy sedation, and diagnostic labels that punished nonconformity as illness. Even when it didn’t kill directly, Millett implies, it could drive people toward suicide, shorten lives through iatrogenic harm, or erase them socially through confinement and stigma.
The subtext is also strategic: by using mortality language, she yanks psychiatry out of the realm of benevolent expertise and into the moral category reserved for war, prisons, and state violence. It’s a rhetorical reversal of the clinical gaze. The profession that claims to prevent self-harm is accused of manufacturing it.
That’s why the line works: it’s not trying to win a seminar debate. It’s trying to make reform impossible to postpone by treating psychiatric harm as an urgent, body-count reality rather than a regrettable side effect of care.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mental Health |
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