As someone with an interest in post-modernism and over-thinking, I often turn my attention to the very interesting field of medical science, psychiatry. I found it humorous that in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the evil antagonists were the Psychiatrists, but not much explanation was given for this role. Without any understanding of this plot decision the bemused reader could only acknowledge this choice with paradoxical laugher, a symptom of mental illness. I'm not completely certain what Dougals Adams thought about this, but psychiatry definitely does have an aura of evilness about it which is hard to define. My own impression is that it exists as sort of an obstinate force against developments in human rights and liberties, but I guess in the context of Adams' book it is against, at least symbolically, the kind of insanity the book(s) is written by. That is the subtextual meaning I infer from that choice of antagonist, as the narration of the book is off-the-wall.

This leads me to contemplate an interesting contrast between psychiatry as 'medicine for the soul' and the vulgar notion of 'laughter as best medicine'. It seems that many mental illnesses are the result of past traumas or physical conditions of the brain, and that madness is in a manner the 'medicine' of the body attempting to heal itself. This is manifest in behaviors like laughing, or shouting, and other emotional instabilities. This is an intuitive conclusion based on the naturalistic ways people deal with better understood physical and emotional traumas, e.g. when they are hurt they cry or laugh etc. So, the message I ultimately glean from this work of madness is that there is an inherent symbolic conflict in 'medicine for the soul'.

Those two preceding paragraphs are just an interlude, to this topic "Philoso-psychiatry" which I suppose means "love of wisdom as medicine for the soul". In many post-modern writings, such as those by Foucault or Deleuze, Psychiatry plays a similar antagonist to writings of symbolic madness: an equivocation can and has been drawn between post-modernism and schizophrenia. Now that the institution of psychiatry has become the forgone conclusion of mental disorder, it has become part of the course of bodily illness that affects the mind in replacement of the body's own often inadequate healing mechanisms. It seems that psychiatry as body attaches its soul to those of the bodies of the mad, so engaging in this kind of philosophy or anti-psychiatry becomes part of this mixed-up 'medicine for the soul'. However, the question is whether this body that attaches itself and its soul to its host, is symbiotic or parasitic.

Psychiatry does in fact help many people from the relationship, like a symbiant, but over the long term its practices and treatments cause illness and death like a parasite. In both cases it grows stronger with resources and knowledge of its subjects. But the knowledge it produces is not philosophical, it is a subset of science. The host is the one that engages in philoso-psychiatry and tries to heal through transcendental thoughts to try to escape its harm. If there is any question as to which is host or parasite, the mad or psychiatry, one need only ask "who made who?".