Healthcare system: caught in the progress trap

I recently came across information that I really want to make available to everyone.

In 2002, an essay by Klaus Dörner was published on the front page of the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the German medical journal. I do not know the man personally, but his essay set alarm bells ringing for me. In the passages highlighted in bold, he writes about why people must be made ill and kept ill:

Ever since, with secularisation, the Enlightenment and modernity, we have been freeing ourselves from the metaphysical ballast of all transcendence (from the aristocracy and the Church to God and nature), and can perceive everything else only as an object to be appropriated, we certainly have every reason to rejoice at the tremendous gains in freedom, availability and wealth brought by these campaigns of conquest, in which human beings increasingly put themselves in the place of nature, fate or God. Yet we are apparently only gradually developing a feel for the side effects of this process of progress, for which we would need something like a “second Enlightenment” (Hubert Markl).

This applies not least to health. For even if the victory over a disease or a prevention programme objectively and measurably promotes health, the result can still be a deterioration in health:

• if a hypochondriac over-attention to the self is the result;
• if we take health to be a substance that is not received as a gift, but that one can acquire and always want more of;
• if we think we can rationally plan, produce and make health;
• if we raise health from a means of living to the purpose of life and thus misuse it;
• if we glorify it as the highest social value, whereby health, which actually depends on being inconspicuous, is prevented altogether;
• and if we thus set ourselves the goal of a suffering-free health society, in which every citizen links the healthcare system with the expectation of having an enforceable right to health. …

Many trends that subjectively aim to promote health but in reality drive the vitality out of society have an all the more destructive effect the more they are left to marketing and competition. These principles are a blessing in the rest of the economy, but in the social sector, and thus in healthcare, they are (perhaps apart from certain areas) deadly.

Competition forces the opening up of new markets. The goal must be to turn all healthy people into sick people, that is, into people who, if possible for their whole lives, consider themselves in need of therapeutic, rehabilitative and preventive manipulation by experts, both chemically and physically as well as psychologically, in order to be able to “live healthily”. This already works quite well in the field of physical illness, but even better in the field of mental disorders, especially as there is no shortage of theories according to which almost no one is healthy.

The transfer of the concept of illness from the physical to the psychological by analogy is questionable. Since the 1990s, depression has been recognised worldwide as insufficiently marketed. A kind of dragnet search for undiscovered depressives – from which some people always genuinely benefit, but most of whom suffer damage to their vitality through additional labelling – has, for example, led in the USA to the number of people treated for depression almost quadrupling from 1.7 to 6.3 million between 1987 and 1997; the decisive factors were the suggestive awareness campaign and aggressive advertising for antidepressants. …

A self-experiment anyone can repeat: for two years I collected from two national newspapers all reports on research into the frequency of mental disorders (for example anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addictions, insomnia, trauma). Adding up the figures showed that every German citizen is in need of treatment several times over. The reports, mostly by well-known professors, generally tried first to make the reader alarmed at the high percentage of each individual disorder, only then to reassure him because today there are the most wonderful cures for it, almost always a combination of psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy – for here cooperation between competitors promises the greatest profit.

Defending or pushing back the limits of one’s own availability, and thus of freedom from helpful, relieving interventions, also concerns a basic stock of pain and suffering (as a precondition for personal maturity), as well as fear and other common senses. Indeed, everyone must secure their right to crises, borderline situations and other burdens such as disability, illness, ageing, dying and death as belonging to them, if life is truly to be experienced, if health is to be vitality and if adversity is to be put to use in one’s life story.

I am shocked by the statements highlighted in bold in this professional journal!

Source: extrablatt of the Rheinische Gesellschaft für Soziale Psychiatrie (Rhineland Society for Social Psychiatry)

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