Like I said in my previous comment, you can certainly characterize the current state of affairs this way. There is a certain qualitative similarity (an inevitab

Like I said in my previous comment, you can certainly characterize the current state of affairs this way. There is a certain qualitative similarity (an inevitable one, if you ask me, since _all_ societies require ways to manage anti-social behavior). But qualitatively things are also profoundly different. Most people who take psychoactive drugs do so willingly and involuntary commitment is relatively rare. In the United States and other places the criteria for such is typically danger to self or others and the process is subject to legal review. Compare that to the circumstances of the Catholic Church before reformation and secularization: the Church was not just a mechanism by which the state exerted a limited control of citizens. It was, in fact, a totalizing worldview which, for the average citizen, was as immovable as the earth. As you have pointed out, it even operated in parallel with, instead of as a subject to, the state. In some sense it was also a state or a meta-state. Psychology, in contrast, is hardly more than a disorganized cultural force with some minor powers given to it by the state and subject to its review. The average citizen is only vaguely aware of it and many people (I'd hazard a guess that most people) have no real interaction with its ideas or apparatuses. I would argue that even where psychology is given some temporal power to restrain citizens, this is done so not out of a blind acceptance of its content as true (or even a cynical assertion of its absolute truth by those in power), but as an attempt to "do the best we can" with our limited understanding of what makes human beings and human societies function or even what functioning might mean. There is one other critical difference (if you ask me): Catholicism and Christianity (religion and spirituality in general) is freighted with a tremendous amount of utter bullshit. Physical and metaphysical claims which are transparently false or absurd. By positioning itself as scientific, and by making substantially fewer claims about the fundamental nature of the universe and the human condition, psychology is, though imperfect, substantially better than what was, if anything, an even more disordered pile of fabulation, fantasies and weird ass ideas.