Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.
Category Archive: Kate Millett
The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.
They weren’t crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.
I saw hell. The hospital had divided and conquered pretty successfully.
However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.
It was horrifying. You wouldn’t believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.
We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.
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.
What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you’re subjected to. My God.
This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It’s based on capital punishment.