Comments by Freya

Showing 13 of 13 comments.

  • Thanks so much for sharing your story Jordan. I’m so sorry you were treated this way. I really appreciate how you explain so clearly the way that patients are ignored, overridden and gaslighted and how that disempowers us and causes extreme and life destroying harms to be perpetrated without accountability. We go to these people with trust and belief that they are doctors and know what they are doing, this is what we are taught to do. When something goes wrong, very often we are disbelieved and blamed.
    This sums up the entire history of psychiatry/mind doctoring for me – experimental treatments which destroy lives and are enabled to continue by a systemic inability to believe patient’s own words. It happens in medicine too, (I don’t believe psychiatry is a medical science) especially to women patients, but at least medicine has a history based in the scientific method and cannot gaslight so easily. Psychiatric treatment is little more than experimentation on systemically silenced people.
    I hope and wish you all the best for your recovery.

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  • Thank you! What I was trying to say, but we get so tired of saying it when it is a concept that seems so impossible for the industry to take in! So as usual we have more experts talking among themselves trying to define something when the people they claim to treat have all the knowledge they need. Studies like this are completely blinded by epistemic privilege – unable to recognise our ability to know or even speak.

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  • Sadly this research misses the central point of the original recovery model which is that recovery is defined by the patient themself.

    Concepts like recovery and person centred care have already been fully co-opted and reduced to rhetorical window dressing while the same dehumanising attitudes and practices continue as usual.

    Determining whether services are actually meeting patient needs and supporting patients to achieve their own definition of recovery would be more useful than a trying to form a consensus idea of recovery as defined by clinicians (with a single token lived experience contribution).

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  • I don’t think educating psychiatrists to be better debaters is going to change a mindset based in a corruption of the medical model. Psychiatry uses language and rhetoric – often dishonestly – to defend its model from the academic end. But psychiatry is not a philosophical endeavour or framed in social justice, It claims to be a science. So called ā€œcultural competenceā€ in other power-based discourses will just be used as rhetorical self justification.
    I agree with critical psychiatry that psychiatry needs to defend / critique / challenge its own scientific basis and its claim to be ā€œevidence-basedā€, it claims to be a science and that is what its power is based on. This is a diversion.
    Cultural ā€œcompetencyā€ looks like a power grab to co-opt discourses like philosophy and sociology to lend itself cultural legitimacy.
    If psychiatry is really interested in cultural competence it needs to listen to its patients first. That would be radical!

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  • I’m so sorry to hear about your family’s terrifying experience and the traumatic effects it has had on your lives – the idea that these experiences can’t be talked about is horrific and shocking.
    The determination of the Maga/Trump/2025 coalition to make some ideas unthinkable is authoritarianism 101.
    I am not surprised to hear that trauma is considered a ā€œwokeā€ concept – as the concept of trauma frequently draws attention to harms caused by abuses of power – so not a concept that an authoritarian regime would want to support.
    I think the concept of traumatic injury – often as the real effects of power on our bodies and minds- can also be liberating and help us to reframe our experiences in terms of wider social forces. But the way it is framed as a ā€˜disorder’ in psychiatric discourse can hide these social origins and cover over real causes and prevent healing.
    I agree we need to take the effects of adversity very seriously- that they cause deep and lasting effects for the individual and society. And that this understanding can be lost when everything upsetting is called trauma.
    However, I’m not sure it is helpful to frame normal responses to adversity as an illness or disorder like OCD, GAD or ā€œclinicalā€ depression – experiences which are not proven to be medical disorders and diseases – and, evidence is growing, are likely to be just different or more extreme responses to adversity.

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  • I’m confused, it sounds like the authors of the paper are describing complex PTSD which was initially defined by Judith Herman as chronic, compounded, interpersonal trauma. I assumed that was clearly applicable to living through social and political upheaval, war and displacement.
    I also am pretty sure that Herman in fact contextualised trauma very firmly in political and social conditions.
    Interesting, but not surprising, that the authors identify a tendency to medicalise and decontextualise trauma – I thought by definition this would not be possible.
    Great explanations of how trauma is a disruption of the individual-social , not just individual, in the paper.
    I wonder if it is, not that the concept of PTS(D) depoliticises trauma, but that the people who use the concept as a diagnosis depoliticise it?
    How can we ensure that any concept does not become commodified and individualised in a psychiatric industry that consumes every concept and shapes it to fits its own medical model?

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  • I would include trauma in the social determinants of mental distress, rather than throw it out with the biomedical model.

    Trauma is defined as the effect of social factors, which distinguishes it from the so-called “diseases”. This is why PTSD does not fit easily into the biomedical model and is not fully recognised by psychiatry.

    Even “individual” childhood and developmental trauma always occurs in a context that is socially determined by factors such as parental isolation, lack of access to services, poverty, racism, intergenerational disadvantage etc.

    Integrating our understanding of the effects of trauma with our understanding of the social factors that cause or contribute to trauma and psychological distress has seemed to be the obvious way forward for decades.

    I agree that relational healing is probably one of the most important factors for trauma. But I don’t really get the jump from recognising the social determinants of psychological distress, to more drug treatment like psychedelics. Every decade or so psychiatry proposes a miracle chemical cure for harms which evidence overwhelmingly shows are socially and environmentally caused (or highly contributing) and therefore solvable, and chooses to kick the can of fixing them down the road.

    If real attention, policy and action was addressed to social determinants and their effects, including trauma, the dominant psychiatric practices of diagnosis and medication would be mostly redundant. Support and healing could be better served by social workers and community support services, with therapy (or medication ) used only for temporary management of more serious effects of trauma and distress.

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