gee, i seem to remember that during the cold war one of the main critiques of the soviet psychiatric system was that they would treat all forms of deviance with drugs.
i am not clear at all--at all--about how the same kind of result would not be obtained by using schools as screening systems.
when i was dragged into trying to help my nephew a few years ago--he was having trouble in a nj public school system (it is an extremely complex story)--it became obvious right away that the school he was in was making no distinction between types of "deviance" and were warehousing kids with behavioural problems (insufficient "respect for authority") with those who had other types of developmental disorders--and the principal of the school was quite up front about it.
if you combine this with how, in the wonderful world of hmo-dominated "health care," psychotropics are too often used not as a supplement to other forms of therapy, but as a functional replacement for them.....if this story were to translate into policy, what would then matter is how the category was defined and who fell into it--because from within the system there would be little chance of appeal, little feedback.
god only knows what types of repression would develop out of this kind of logic merging with a conservative sense of the world---what types of opinion management would dovetail with the pathologization of all types of "social deviance" if the right gets to control the definition of deviance.
i do not see a single good side to this, and a hope that this proposal remains a sketchy paranoid fiction.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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