In any society that prioritizes economic efficiency, productivity and order above life and all of life’s varieties, people experiencing altered and extreme emotional states will be seen as defective and as burdens—monkey wrenches that disturb the societal assembly line.
To be clear, contemporary American society is not Nazi-German society when it comes to treating people labeled with “serious mental illness,” as it is taboo in American society to directly murder this population as was done in Nazi Germany. But in the United States in the earlier part of the twentieth century, there was widespread compulsory sterilization of those diagnosed with serious mental illness; and from the 1970s through the early 1990s, dehumanizing experiments that ignored the Nuremberg Code of research ethics were administered on this population by prominent American psychiatrists. And today in contemporary American society, apparently it is acceptable for this population to die, on average, 25 years prematurely without challenging the authorities in charge of treating them. More later on psychiatry’s blame for this premature death rate.