Cruel Compassion

This study examines ways in which psychiatry is used to control, segregate, and "treat" society's unwanted: adult dependents, the homeless, and those labelled mentally ill. Just as society once put the indigent in the poorhouse and workhouse, housed epileptics in state institutions, and imprisoned defaulting debtors, today coercive psychiatric practices are used to dispose of "undesirable" persons. But such coercion, the author contends, is counterproductive, injurious to the individual's dignity and liberty, and morally wrong. He argues that society must reject the infantilization of mental patients, and accord them the same rights and freedoms due those with bodily illness or no illness at all.