The Manufacture of Medical Stigma

There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that affect their feelings and thoughts—and the traditional persecution 

To illustrate in depth the ways in which Institutional Psychiatry serves the function of stigmatizing individuals as mentally ill, thus producing psychiatric scapegoats, 1 shall review some representative medical, journalistic, legal, and psychiatric writings on the nature of mental illness, psychiatric care, and mental health services. I shall begin with the views of an important authority in public health, a discipline often taken as the model of modern socially oriented psychiatry, and work my way toward specifically psychiatric contributions. 

Milton I. Roemer, a professor of public health at the University of California at Los Angeles, extols social medicine as the answer to all health problems. The importance of the hospital, he writes, 

Roemer does not, however, spell out the moral and social consequences of the arrangement he so enthusiastically supports. If the physician is an essential servant required by society, then his role is comparable to that of the policeman or the soldier as such, his duty is to obey the commands of his superiors, whether they order him to cure or to kill. If, like Roemer, physicians wish to repeal the Hippocratic ethic that has so far governed the practice of medicine in the United States, it would seem desirable—not, to be sure, for the attainment of their goals, but for an intelligent public appreciation of the competing interests and values at stake—that they plainly say so. Many advocates of medical collectivism do.  

Donald Gould, a British journalist writing in the New States- 

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