MENTAL ILLNESS IS A PRODUCT OF SOCIETY

'..As the atomizing violences systematically and permanently are crippling one class of human beings to sub-humans (Untermenschen) - this both externally and internally - we all can see and understand that the sample in totality of these human beings Engels is referring to has been struck by this illness which can be conceived as one great damage which is inflicted at once on those who are depending on wages (Lohnabhaengigen) and as rebellion of life against this damage, which had reduced them to the state of mere objects. The social relations having changed since 1845 profoundly, alienation (Entfremdung) is persisting up to now. And it will remain so, as long as the capitalist System does, for this alienation is, as you express it, "prerequisite and result" (Voraussetzung und Resultat) of the economic production. Illness is - as you say - the only way (Form) of life in capitalism. It is true that the psychiatrist who is a wage-dependent (Lohnabhaengiger), is - as everybody and we ourselves are - an ill man. But it is only to him that the ruling class offers the power to "heal" ("heilen") or to intern (zu heilen oder einzuweisen). "Curing" ("Heilung"), that goes without saying, in the ruling System can never mean abolishing (Abschaffung) illness; it ("curing", "healing") exclusively serves to restore your fitness to work (Arbeitsfaehigkeit) while you continue being ill.'

---Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre to
SPK - Turn Illness into a Weapon

A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed. --R D LAING