GIA writes:
Every era is the same. The standards for sanity change very little.
TD has already pointed out how absurd this statement is when considering history. I would like to point out how absurd this statement is when considering different governments and different cultures.
Many dissidents were committed to an insane asylum in the Soviet Union for doing what the former communist government then considered an insane act, namely criticizing the communist government. This all happened during the 1970s, when I was not only alive but also voting.
From the Wikipedia article on Psychiatric Hospital:
quote:
In some nations, mental hospitals were used as sites for the stifling of political dissidence or even genocide. Under Nazi Germany, a euthanasia program began which resulted in the killings of tens of thousands of the mentally ill housed in state institutions, and the killing techniques perfected at these sites became later implemented in the Holocaust (see T-4 Euthanasia Program). In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often put into asylums and kept on a variety of destabilising medications, with the hope of not simply removing them from society, but making them unreliable in the eyes of others (see Psikhushka). In the case of Zhores Medvedev, the ire of officials was aroused by manuscripts that had been published (without his permission) in the West and a book, Biology and the Cult of Personality, which was an attack on Lysenkoism.
The attitudes in these cases - that the mentally ill were a scourge and needed to be eliminated, and that the line between 'patient' and 'prisoner' is incredibly blurry - have their precedents in the history of mental hospitals, though were taken to extremes by totalitarian regimes.
Therefore your statement is contradicted by both history, and what, for me at one time, were current events.
Edited by anglagard, : grammar
Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider - Francis Bacon
The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God - Spinoza
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