However, the social responsibility of caring for the mentally ill is an essential function of psychiatry and should not be neglected. The question is how well psychiatry fulfills its role. Critical psychiatry suggests that psychiatric practice is often inadequate for a number of reasons. This article will review this critique of psychiatry by examining its main constituents. Detaining the mentally ill creates the potential for abuse.
Psychiatric services have to find a precarious balance beside abuse and neglect.
Accordingly it can be difficult to sustain interpersonal relationships. One temptation is to retreat into objectification of those identified as mentally ill, insisting on the somatic nature of their illness. An advantage of this strategy is that it protects those trying to provide care from the pain experienced by those needing support. Notwithstanding some intuitive understanding of mental illness as a disorder of the mind, it is simpler to concentrate on its bodily substrate. Such a biological bias is not new in psychiatry, although psychopharmacological developments following the discovery of antipsychotics and antidepressants have reinforced this emphasis.