The problem with the mental health industry...

...is when it ceases to become a means of helping people self-analyze and instead becomes a tool of oppression by the government. This is the main problem as I see it. When such an industry suddenly decides to control people's behavior to make them more compliant with mainstream thinking rather than helping them analyze themselves and perhaps heal them of certain mental afflictions then it can justifiably be said that such institutions have become corrupt. Whether or not the entire industry is deserving of such condemnation can possibly be determined by discovering how many mental health workers are actually trying to help people learn about their problems and overcome them and how many of them are acting as political tools for imposing the will of the government and the tyrannical majority (which is not true democracy) on the people.

In my personal opinion and based upon my personal observations, it all depends on the individual mental health expert and what they spend their time doing. Those which work directly under the aegis of the government and actively seek to diagnose anyone who disagrees with the system as being "mentally ill" is clearly acting as a soldier rather than a medical practitioner and deserves all of the criticism (and more!) that LGsinmyheart is heaping upon them. Such people are truly abusing their position as protectors of our mental health. Obviously, there are some dedicated, humanitarian, and ethical mental health workers who are truly out to help people conquer their inner demons. But how many work as de facto soldiers for the system? It's all too common in totalitarian nations, and I'm hoping that people in the so-called democratic nations demand good ethics from the people who oversee our mental health, because such people can do irreparable harm to a supposedly "free" nation by imitating how the industry often acts in nations that do not support freedom of thought and expression. This is also a lesson to those of my intellectual allies who actually see totalitarianism as being "good" for MAA's (*cough*Remo*cough*) and who actually believe that the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. have a genuine working democracy (I will argue that they do not).