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The fact that the psychiatrist is authorized to use force to impose the role of mental patient on legally competent persons against their will is prima facie evidence that the psychiatrist possesses state-sanctioned power. In 1913, Karl Jaspers ([1913] 1963)2 acknowledged the unique importance of this element of psychiatric practice. He wrote:
Admission to hospital often takes place against the will of the patient and therefore the psychiatrist finds himself in a different relation to his patient than other doctors. He tries to make this difference as negligible as possible by deliberately emphasizing his purely medical approach to the patient, but the latter in many cases is quite convinced that he is well and resists these medical efforts. (839-40)
The systematic exercise of force requires legitimation. Formerly, Church and State, representing and implementing God's design for right living, performed this function. Today, Medicine and State perform it. W. H. Auden ([1962] 1968) put it thus:
What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced society is not, strictly speaking, a political one, that is today, it is not concerned with human beings as persons and citizens, but with human bodies.... In all technologically advanced countries today, whatever political label they give themselves, their policies have, essentially, the same goal: to guarantee to every member of society, as a psychophysical organism, the right to physical and mental health. (87)
http://www.iatrogenic.org/library/case.html
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