I appreciate your clarity Steve – this is such an important point! – the psychiatric mindset is so embedded that it seems inconceivable to some (including in the legal system) that we are not talking about real things but concepts. Psychiatric diagnostic concepts have achieved an unquestionable mythical status. A status based in the equally unquestionable idea that human experience and behaviour can be divided into kinds which are categorically different in some way. Psychiatric and cultural categories like sane/insane or pathological/normal – are purely conceptual value-based binary oppositions, which have no external referent of any kind. It does my head in how powerful these kinds of concepts can be! I use “mis-diagnosis’ to emphasise that they are all “misdiagnoses” – but I forget that’s not how others understand psych diagnosis. And, as you explain, this misuse of language needs to be clearly challenged because it is what is used as the spurious justification for denying our human rights, including the right to bodily autonomy and choice – and subjects us to dangerous physical interventions – with or without our consent.
Steve, I agree – there is no way to judge anyone’s experience through arbitrarily imposed superficial behavioural and psychological concepts, which are equally as normative (and coercive) as any psychiatric diagnosis. The concept of neurodivergence actually depends on ‘pathologising’ others – (as “neurotypical” or “neuronormative” or whatever the current terminology.)
If the choice is between calling yourself neurodivergent or being labelled (pathologically?) uncaring and inherently oppressive – i question how liberating that ideology can really be.
Thanks Katie, I identify very much with what you say. It has taken me years to escape the power of that hegemonic narrative over my own identity. And it’s always an ongoing process, when it’s so embedded in our language and culture.
Perhaps that is why some psychiatric survivors might not be eager to embrace another would-be hegemonic (sorry, “paradigmatic” !) interpretion of our experiences?
And an equallly normative ideology (just different norms)!
So important to make this distinction Steve! All psychiatric diagnoses are mis-diagnosis. And all psychiatric patients are victims of lack of consent – not only because the required legal standards are routinely ignored – but because the research is inadequate and biased, and because all diagnoses are false and unproven. So meaningful informed consent is impossible.
Of course any legal action is valuable in challenging the malpractices of psychiatry – so thank you for taking action Ellen. I would love to see many more actions but many psychiatric survivors are impoverished and disabled by psychiatric mis-treatment.
Very sadly, deteriorating health, related to psychiatric drugs, is also ignored and blamed on the (unproven) underlying “disease” in mental health services which should be aware of the risks. We need more awareness of the hidden deaths caused by polypharmacy and over medication especially in community services, where isolation (often people without family or under public guardianship have absolutely no advocacy) is contributing to deaths of sheer negligence.
Flick, this is one of the few spaces where critical perspectives of psychiatric survivors and advocates can be shared and discussed freely and seriously. I would hate to see this vital function shut down through the kind of misuse of terms like epistemic injustice I suggest you are making here.
To claim that simple disagreement with your beliefs is a form of injustice is very harmful in my opinion. In your usage, epistemic injustice can be applied to any situation in which our beliefs are challenged. This is a trivialisation of the concept of injustice.
Preventing the discussion of ideas in the name of “justice” for one group is exactly why identitarian ideologies like ND are problematic. I suggest this kind of usage of the idea of epistemic injustice does not actually support the sharing of alternatives, it suppresses important debate.
I would argue, that psychiatric and institutional power, in fact, overwhelmingly supports neurodivergent ideology including substantial academic advocacy, economic influence, huge popular uptake, as well uptake by specialist discourses like psychology. I suggest this is because it does not threaten the dominant psy-industry narratives. Whereas critical views which threaten psychiatric dominance are demonstrably suppressed, discredited and silenced in public discourse.
People subject to psychiatric power depend on access to critical thinking and ideas to demystify the effects of a psychiatric ideology which often binds them in false and degraded identities, as well as life-destroying mis-treatments. We don’t have to agree with them, any more than someone with a diagnosis of ADHD or Autism has to believe in ND ideology. But we have right to discuss them openly and to be challenged on them equally.
I have to agree – neurodiversity is also big business. The medicalisation of every inch our lives is enthusiastically supported by an explosion of traditional and alternative health “solutions”. I see the explosion of so-called “neurodevelopmental disorders” as closely related to this too. Commodification has always been the capitalist “solution” to alienation – we are just being sold more imaginary solutions and identities as inequality and precarity intensifies – it’s all part of the same neoliberal capitalist logic.
Flick, you have referred to this “alternative” ( and somewhat hermetic), neurodivergent knowledge before, however I would like to see the ideas actually spelled out one day. I sometimes think there is an aversion to real debate in neurodivergent ideology? Unfortunately this can look very authoritarian, and can end up cultivating its own exceptionalism through imaginary opposition. How would anyone know?
If you decline to explain how the neurodivergent paradigm differs from the psychiatric biomedical paradigm it’s impossible to know what you are actually saying or what alternative you are actually advocating?
I have read a lot of the people you reference and am not any the wiser. Their ideas seem to be founded on linguistic mystifications – massive generalisations based on very scant, selective cherry-picked “evidence” Politically, their ideas are exactly as this article describes – a retreat into simplistic binaries of good and evil, lacking any structural analysis of how difference is constructed and classed except by an appeal to some unproven innate “differences” which seem to cover the entire range of human experience and behaviour. This kind of politics is just us v them – it’s entirely dependent on the reification of simplistic psychological differences into fixed essentialist identities – with extremely morally coercive overtones.
Thanks Joe, I really liked the connections you made to the idea of alienation too. I’ve been reading Todd McGowan Embracing Alienation, about how Identities are an attempt to escape alienation. It seems to me that Identitarian movements are often seeking a return to imaginary wholeness and belonging which they assume is in the power of the Other to give, rather than recognising alienation as a condition we all experience, perhaps.
I for one have definitely read the series and appreciated it and I think I commented on it. My comments are mostly venting – I expect that last one was a bit incomprehensible :D.
I agree the points here are very much the same as that series which was a really comprehensive and much need analysis . I especially appreciated the way you drew out the implications of neuro ideology in the way it further marginalises people with severe disability as well as marginalises the experiences and rights of psychiatric survivors who have been fighting for awareness for so long.
I think those points can never be made too often I guess, when some neurodivergent advocates are trying to claim the epistemic ground from psych survivors and critics – distorting survivor views and experiences as well as blatantly misrepresenting critical psychiatry knowledge.
I just hope more people will recognise that psych survivor interests are not the same- are actually diametrically opposed by neuro ideology – which , despite it’s pseudo-“radical” language, is in complete lockstep with the status quo of psychiatric dominance and has no real understanding of the violent reality of psychiatry which is premised on the same unproven neuro ideology.
This is the real difference between the critical psychiatric survivor movement and the neurodivergent movement. Neuro ideology aims simply to rearrange the hierarchy of “differences” while keeping the psychopathology paradigm intact. Because neurodivergence is literally unthinkable without the imaginary construction of the “neurotypical” Other, and unthinkable outside the psychiatric paradigm of fixed inherent brain differences.
While neuro ideology vainly tries to separate the “pathology” from a supposed medical science (which is defined by pathologies), many critical psych survivors understand that so-called psychopathologies are not based on any inherent existing “differences”, but on actions of power which arbitrarily define and code differences into fixed diagnoses (and identities).
Many critics have pointed out that the structural and systemic function of psychiatry is not care or medicine -but control – control through redefining social problems as individual problems – blaming individual biology or psychology or individual “differences” for social and political failures. Failures which affect everyone – even if they aren’t aware of them – becuse they are obscured and hidden by the false individualising narratives of psychiatry and others, like the current neurodivergence narrative.
Most psych survivors know that anyone can be labelled “mad” or “mentally ill”, because there is no ontological basis to psychiatric labels. Unfortunately, neuro ideology and even some Mad ideology, clings to the unfounded ontologies of difference which underpin psychiatry’s power and status. Until we deconstruct this structural base of psychiatric power – the power to code difference into social and legal hierarchies – based on false claims to knowledge – there will always be another group, another negative term, another outside the inside of authority and recognition to be reclaimed – or, like the imaginary “neurotypical” – to be vilified and Othered outside the coded hierarchy of acceptable “difference” and identities. Identity is always socially mediated, coded and constructed. Real difference and diversity is a fact of life and outside the codes of power. Rearranging values in hierarchies of difference doesn’t challenge the hierarchy itself- or the power behind it – it flattens human difference into codified classes to be manipulated and rearranged by those with the most power and the loudest voices.
Exactly! If we need a diagnosis to treat to *some* people better what does that say about how we treat everyone else? Working from the basic assumption that all people and children are sensitive and deserve consideration and respect as individuals is a much less complicated approach than labelling kids with spurious diagnoses before they have even had a chance to fully develop their brain and sense of self.
Myth “ .2. a widely held but false belief or idea.” (Oxford languages).
Psychiatric history is a history of failed theories, barbaric “treatments” and constant reinventions. A history of changing narratives to suit the times and to fend off criticism. Psychiatric ideology is an entirely vacuous pseudo-science – a false belief system, a myth.
Hey Kevin, thank you, and I’m sure we really would as that connection you made with AI and the DSM was so relevant – some kind of coding system for behavioural management seems to be where an unholy alliance between big data and psy-industries is already heading.
Im in Australia – which calls itself the “lucky country” – so I did think the delusional positivity thing might just be here 😀
Perhaps a kind of performative positivity is now part of the code in all relatively safe and protected nations where we still have some privilege to cling to? The worse neoliberal reality gets, it seems the more self-help and positive psychotherapies teach us to blame our troubles on the “wrong mindset” and “wrong thinking”? If it’s not psychiatry blaming our faulty brains, we have psychology blaming our thoughts and feelings. Just don’t blame the wider systems!
I love the critical thinking on this site tho – perhaps psychiatry survivors are more independent thinkers? Maybe that’s why we end up in the psych system in the first place – we’re asking too many questions?
Thanks Kevin , I have been called pessimistic, but I’m just channeling Orwell etc 😀
Some animals are always more equal than others in any hierarchical system- so it can’t be good when pseudo-scientific technocrats appoint themselves the power to decide human value.
I think critical thinking is just never needed by those with power. And agree, some of the usual critical thinkers have less to say. I wonder if the focus on identities, rather than structures, of inequality just reinforces hierarchical thinking and supremacist ideas? Ideologues use identity narratives to suppress critical thinking – so critical ideas seem to have be sidelined by exercises in pointing fingers at others while trying to avoid a finger being pointed at yourself. Mutual in/out-group dehumanisation supports structural dehumanisation perhaps?
Thanks Bill, liked the article about the legal system and was thinking about it – systems are just not designed to care about people, only to perpetuate themselves. Will be looking at other links. Returning to connection-focused ways of living seems almost impossible sometimes, tho I think just sharing ideas can make a difference.
John, great thought-provoking comment, thanks – final stage human as resource and Huxley quote are chillingly too real. As people are queuing up for diagnoses, it seems we are voluntarily giving over the power to classify and assign human value to unaccountable pseudo-scientific technocrats. With AI refining the process of coding human behaviour into units of production and control.
Kevin, I agree – it’s like watching animals queuing up to be tagged at the slaughterhouse. It doesn’t seem like a great time to have a psychiatric label. Historically, attempts at arbitrary biological classification systems don’t end well- they end up as moral justifications for supremacy and violence.
While ‘neurodevelopmental disorder” is being marketed as the “soft” version of “mental illness” – in reality it’s exactly the same product being sold – simplistic unproven biological explanations for normal human differences. Difference which can easily be stigmatised in exactly the same way as so-called mental illnesses.
Dan, I think this is so important and supported by research into effects of childhood adversity, but obviously adversities at any age as well. Children in families with poverty and stress are more exposed to trauma. There are material realities – economic reality being primary in this culture – that limit choices and affect human behaviour from birth imo. Most people in the criminal and mental health systems are disproportionally affected by trauma, poverty and other social exclusionary factors like race. Even extreme, narcissistic behaviour is believed to be a reaction to trauma. It’s hard not to end up in nature/nurture debates like biological v social determinants, but social determinants seem to be at least as critical to individual psychology as any other factors, tho I suspect it’s too complex an interrelationship to be covered by any simple model.
Marc, There is biology in every human behaviour, feeling and reaction.
Again, as per many other comments here, that is not proof of mental illness, or proof of anything at all.
Your statements are not arguments, they are repetitions of the same point without change. Unlike everyone else here, you believe you can force your opinions on others with pointless name-calling, pointless repetition, and rage. I call that extreme.
Dan, too scarily similar to the real world 😀
Would def require a panel of commentating professionals to analyze the gaslighting, and 2 psychiatrists on stand-by to sign the documents as contestants are hauled off.
Maybe call it Crazymaking by numbers?
Dan, I agree – systemic ideas take the focus off individual psychologies, individuals have only so much power and choice, and choice is not evenly available to everyone.
Micro and macro systems support and sustain each other and shape each other. The patriarchal nuclear family unit is a product of culture and history, it’s not universal. One theory is that it formed in the Industrial Revolution due to need for mobile labor forces to move to cities and support factories.
I think psychology is deeply affected and shaped by institutional structures. Rigid and established structures have a lot more power to do the shaping of individual psychologies than vice versa – by rewarding certain behaviours and punishing others according to whether the behaviour supports the needs of the system to continue and survive.
I see the patriarchal nuclear family as another institutional structure – it does have a very central role in creating helpful or harmful models of relationship that shape individual psychology. But families exist in wider systems in which raising children is seen as private and exclusive to the isolated nuclear family. Caregiving is also economically devalued, so caregivers are structurally isolated and have no support. I think this creates so much stress on nuclear family relationships that can have deep adverse affects on individual psychology.
Marc, putting aside the meaningless labels you’re slinging, I think you are struggling to accept that other people just have a different opinion to you. All of your arguments are forms of apologism – “yes it’s not perfect, but…what can we do?”
“It’s not perfect” is another logical fallacy – you’ve just concealed and dismissed a hell of a lot important issues with that statement.
How is it not perfect? Why is it not perfect? What effect is that having on people while we wait for reforms that never come, or that immediately revert back to same basic model of mistreatment?
As Steve said, no one is denying suffering, or science.
Psychiatric “science” does not stand up. Psychiatric scientism is actually just marketing. Its claims to truth contradict the scientific model in using constructs that are unfalsifiable.
I disagree with psychiatry on the basis that its fundamental premises are wrong. And that those fundamental premises are harmful. Logically, the solution to that is abolition, regardless of all the dust and distractions thrown up by defenders of psychiatry.
The fundamental premise that there will be, in the future, some discovered biological basis to things called “mental illness” is wrong – unproven and unfalsifiable.
The fundamental premise that some behaviours can be classified as “illness” and others as “not illness” is wrong – attempts at nosology continuously fail to meet basic scientific requirements of validity and reliability.
The fundamental premise that the system will eventually reform itself is wrong – see – a history of routinely denying the reality of patient experiences and systematically co-opting criticism with lip service, superficial reforms.
The rest is all wishful thinking and marketing, smoke and mirrors.
Dan, thanks for sharing that essay – I completely agree. When a power-based (perhaps?) sick system scales up, then human to human connection and reciprocity becomes more and more difficult. And the system will automatically reward and support behaviour which supports the system – individualism, competition, and power-seeking. While discouraging connection, community and reciprocity. In the extractive, transactional logic of the system vulnerability and connection are pathologised as weakness, rather than understood as a fundamental reality of existence. We’re encouraged to call normal human reactions and differences symptoms of biological brain glitches – to be repaired by technocrats – rather than recognise them as meaningful responses to systematic dehumanisation.
I agree with Birdsong that choosing power over connection is a sick response to a sick system. But I also find it really helpful to understand just how sick the system is, because we are systematically taught to blame ourselves by almost every psy-technology there is.
Birdsong, work in progress for me – getting out from under the cult brainwashing takes work – it’s so embedded -especially if we’ve been squashed by other power-based systems – like family – before psychiatry perfected the technology!
Marc, not talking about things is not the solution. You’re basically saying things are so bad we should just stop talking about them. Same with psychiatry, you’re saying there is no point discussing change because we don’t agree. A lot of people here actually do agree. Basically when you use those arguments, you’re just asking people not to discuss anything because you have it all worked out. That’s not discussion , that’s shutting down discussion and ideas. You’re just saying I’m ok with it, while denying the reality of people who do experience severe harm in the psychiatric system.
And those people have worked out that it is the model psychiatry is using to explain human behaviour which is causing that harm. That’s worth discussing I think. Just defending the model because it works for you is asking the rest of us to pretend we haven’t experienced any harm – which is a lie – and is the lie that psychiatry depends on to keep causing harm with impunity and with the same unaccountability it has now. Silence is very convenient to any unaccountable power and you’re basically saying don’t talk about it because it’s divisive and we can’t do anything about it. That’s just denial of reality disguised as pragmatism.
Dan Nelson, i like you analysis. I think it’s part of the logic of systems to value and reward control, so it’s likely if you conform to the needs of systems you have an ability to be impermeable to others and prefer control over connection?
Non-productive emotions and experiences are increasingly being funneled into professionalised emotion-containment systems, effectively closing off the once common spaces of genuine human connection and community.
Normal human reactions and emotions are now barely tolerated in our cultures unless they are framed and validated as “symptoms” of an official “disorder”- to be contained by a process of systematic emotional neglect, abandonment and dehumanisation – which is masked by the rhetoric of ‘health care’ and ‘medicine.’
Once you recognise the systematic gaslighting of mental ‘health’ industries in which neglect and abuse is reframed as care – you can’t unsee the harm being done by this lie.
I have to share this link because I get a lot of cathartic enjoyment in the compassion and humour of this podcaster. As well as clarity, understanding and de-shaming of my own experiences of gaslighting and abuse in family and psychiatric systems.
They use politics and philosophy to demystify the effects of emotion-phobic corporate capitalism on our ability to feel and connect.
On the weaponisation of forced positivity: The Loneliness Industry Podcast: https://youtu.be/hj-G-qpmYJA
Content warning – sweary humour 😀
Steve, 100%
It’s a mythology. It’s so weird that a lot of psychiatrists actually believe it which makes it a belief system and a cult as well as Laura Delano said!
Arj, I think that’s why there is no point in asking for change from a specialty which is simply not designed for or founded in premises or principles of care, health or human needs.
As you say – there are other choices, as long as psychiatry controls the narrative of human nature and human suffering, those choices are limited.
If psychiatry claims to be a science, then it needs to prove that the science is valid. If psychiatry claims to be a health service then it needs to prove it’s services actually meet people’s needs.
I don’t see psychiatry as capable of doing any of these things effectively – has in fact totally failed to fulfill either of these functions.
Arj, I think I’ve said I completely agree with you – psychiatry is causing untold harm for no purpose. I am fully in support of its complete abolition and replacement from a ground-up shared understanding of what exactly we think psychiatry is “treating” (nothing- is my answer) and what we think actual “care” and health really means for whole people with bodies and minds and needs and rights.
Gary, it’s helpful for me to read others ideas here too – i even find others’ anger is all validating and part of the process of getting free of psychiatry’s gaslighting and scapegoating. But there’s no point directing it at each other if we can help it. ideas help me think my way out of the blame psychiatry directs at us. As you say, psychiatry is based on the worst form of ingnorance and fear so sharing ideas can only help.
Bill, i really don’t understand your replies to my comments. Firstly I’m not angry enough? Now I’m too angry?
What exactly is it you are trying to say, because I cant really identify any actual point or purpose to your comments?
Understanding psychiatry as part of a wider system does not exonerate it from anything.
I agree psychiatry created itself, it did this by exploiting a need of society to control inconvenient populations and then creating a perception of need in the middle classes. It’s survives by being useful – by reinforcing the dominant values of capitalism and punishing or pathologising behaviour which doesn’t fit the needs of the wider systems which give it license and power to operate.
Psychiatry would not have the power and status it has now if it did not perform a function which is useful to the state and society. Understanding why psychiatry exists and survives is crucial to getting rid of it I think.
I’m not here to get angry, I’m here to understand how it works so we can change it.
Marc, I’m so tempted to agree 😀
Maybe it’s that our system rewards some types of behaviour more than others? It’s actually pretty sane to be struggling with emotions and reactions in our current culture, so why is it that the people who do get pathologised?
One reason I think change is slow is that powerful systems like capitalism – any hegemonic system – tends to split and divide interest groups against each other and make solidarity difficult because we depend on the system to survive. Plus a lot of psychiatric survivors are disabled, poor, isolated, drugged or locked up, so organization is a problem!
I do think the survivors movement has come a long way -when you consider that most of us could be locked up and forced medicated with absolutely no unaccountability not long ago, and the protections and accountability hasn’t improved much now. So it’s a wonder we’ve been able to get our voices heard at all really. ( Thanks to sites like this one, and to other survivors, groups and movements in the past.)
I’m amazed people forget the eugenics ideology when talking about biologically determined differences in behaviours emotions etc. It hasn’t really changed- now stigma is blamed on public ignorance, not the industry actually churning out the mythology it’s based on. With authoritarianism increasing globally it’s a scary time to be branded with a made-up label based on unfalsifiable theories of inherent biological differences.
Thanks Arj, I think our culture just doesn’t value human emotions – especially not the kinder ones, they’re seen as weakness, and non-productive, so normal emotional reactions are pathologised.
Psychiatry didn’t create the system, it just reflects the same dominant values and enables them to be maintained.
Marc, I agree with Steve, there are so many options which we don’t actually have while psychiatry is still defining what we need (what it can get away with “providing”).
I’m one of those millions and I expect many of us here are. We could better get our needs met focussing on what needs to change to create a system that actually serves people’s real needs, and doesn’t create isolation, disability and poverty in the first place.
Inside the narrrow psychiatric model – whose needs are actually being met? Certainly not the most disadvantaged and disabled I’d say – the people who have the least ability and power to make their needs heard are too drugged, isolated, disabled and impoverished.
It’s clear that you don’t feel you’re getting what you need – I wonder, does anyone? Is psychiatry even about providing care or meeting needs at all? Such a large number of us are actually disabled and isolated by the supposed “treatment” itself. Who is the model actually serving?
To me it does not look like the purpose of psychiatry is care, or health – it looks like it’s simply controlling and containing a population with a minimal fig leaf of “medicine” and “care” for optics which satisfies the public who don’t know or need to know the reality. It allows societies and those in power to keep ignoring the problems they cause, and to avoid addressing the understandable human reactions and difficulties people sometimes need help with.
I think we deserve more and we won’t get it if we keep accepting crumbs to keep this or that group of patients or service users quiet with a change of rhetoric, or new increasingly reductive and limited service models which actually serve no-one.
The mental health and psychiatric systems are designed to meet the needs of the system, not the needs of people.
Hey Arj, I agree with you. I think that psychiatry should be fully abolished. It’s not medicine, it’s not care, it’s not anything except a system that perpetuates itself with lies and stories about unproven biological differences. If you deconstruct this basic assumption of psychiatry: that human behaviour and emotions can be contained in a simplistic model, psychiatry loses its relevance and purpose.
As much as we try to make psychiatry more humane, I think that will be resisted by psychiatry. Because its entire medical, social and legal function and powers, exist in this concept of essential biological differences, and a vague concept of “mental”, which only psychiatry has the “expertise” to understand and “treat.”
Once that goes – psychiatry unravels.
Then we can decide what real care and support looks like – mind altering drugs can become an informed choice and can be prescribed by any practioner.
Any actual neurological problems – like Alzheimers can be treated by an actual evidence based neurological specialty.
Social support and care can be focused on social conditions and solutions and dependent on needs and choices led by the person.
I’m over simplifying, but I think we need to ask what functions psychiatry is fulfilling and whether there are other ideas and services which can do this better.
Thanks Gina, I confess it’s not mine and comes from survivor researcher Diana Rose. I agree it’s critical to recognise this because the abuses of human rights psychiatry is allowed to perpetrate are dependent on this idea that we are unable to “know”. And our ability to know, is what the dominating knowledge field called psychiatry refuses to recognise. While it is commonly understood in other medical-health contexts that patient knowledge, let alone consent, should be included in some way (regardless of variability in actual practices)-.
I think this is critical to understanding that psychiatry is not actually a legitimate form of medicine which conforms to standard medical conventions, and that its purpose and function is not “health-care”.
I love how this article centres on needs of patients and psychiatric survivors.
Usually we have experts telling us their ideas of what we need and then expecting us to fit into their framework.
What I get from this is just how powerful the idea of survivors and service users and patients leading the discussion is.
While experts might have similar ideas, the authority of patient and survivor knowledge is much more powerful to me. Both as a narrative and as rooted in the central issue of how our bodies are treated.
We need to keep centring survivor knowledge if we are going to change things in my opinion. If we don’t any future solutions based solely on other forms of knowledge/authority will risk being harmful.
Survivor/patient/service user knowledge needs to be recognised as knowledge, not just a perspective (which can be ignored).
This means survivor knowledge should lead discussions focused on care and treatment. Just like any other model of service or care should.
If anything I see a lot of current debate as a battle for power and meaning which has little to do with care but is focused on controlling the narrative to maintain existing power structures and the authority and legitimacy of those structures.
Me too, Birdsong, diagnoses have become commodities now to go with commodified identities. I think it is a generational change. People have grown up now in a totalising psy-dominated reality.
….And how psychiatry really is the new religion.
Try to question “diagnosis” these days and you will be cast as a heartless heretic who is advocating mass murder. People are preaching diagnoses with evangelical conviction in some places. It’s so out of control, I wonder if it’s the product of a generation brought up to believe the values of neoliberalism are all there is – especially with social media reflecting it back to us constantly? They seem to need some kind of explanation for why they’re not the “successful” images they see around them?
I agree, it’s no coincidence. Psychiatry has been playing this game from its beginnings – as long as it’s indispensable to powerful interests it will survive by adapting its ideology to currrnt demands. Foucault said that madness is defined as whatever behaviours contradict or undermine the core values of the dominant ideology. When the dominant ideology was religion, mystical visions were accepted as real. Now the dominant ideology is individualism and free markets anyone that doesn’t treat themselves like a commodity or reacts to inhumane systems with distress or anger or confusion is mad perhaps?
getoflex, I’m glad you’re finding a way out. I’m in exactly same situation- and there’s no support if you want to stop the drugs either, I’m struggling just to find a psych to deprescribe me. So we can still be effectively trapped and deprived of our legal right to bodily autonomy even when we are not under any kind of legal treatment order. It’s a total stitch up based on the completely unjustified belief that psychiatrists have some mysterious power to predict future behaviour. I’m finding ways to help myself too and just connect with others going thru the same things. I really think sharing information and ideas is the way to escape the psychiatric hegemonic hold over our reality.
I think that the article probably couldn’t cover everything. I also think that it’s contradictory to conflate a drug-induced effect with a supposed “disease” like “schizophrenia” which is believed to be caused by an inherent brain dysfunction. If “schizophrenia” can be induced then the biological model of permanent life-long “disorders” is wrong. It’s more likely that so-called “schizophrenia” has many causes which can create reactions that look like what we call psychosis. Calling these kinds of reactions a single “conditon/disorder/disease” is not actually clarifying or helping anything and in fact is misleading psychiatrists into using blunt hammers to drive in imaginary nails.
Calling substance use a “disorder” removes the individual reasons which might make people use any substance – prescribed or unprescribed, legal or not – this doesn’t help anyone identify why they are using – for eg unmet emotional needs – or how they can get those needs met in other ways when substance use creates its own problems. Even alcohol use has negative effects on mood and anxiety so legalisation is not the problem.
In my opinion the effects of cannabis use are the same as other drugs – including psychiatric drugs – they can change and affect our brains in desirable and undesirable, more or less permanent, ways which are yet to be understood and should all be treated with the same caution. And promoting any of them as “safe and effective” is dangerously misleading.
Yes. Exactly! Psychiatry is the other side of the neoliberal narrative of individualism, success and control. The place where abuse, pain, “failure”, and loss of control gets blamed and reframed as brain differences and “illness” by pathologising emotions and calling them “symptoms”.
Exactly, Louise, we are individuals responding to life in our own ways with various resources, strengths and vulnerabilities. I’m so sorry you have been treated with denial and pathologisation by people close to you. It can make it so much harder for us to get out from under the false psychiatric narrative and start finding our own solutions. It takes a lot of courage to go against what everyone’s trying to force on you. I feel a lot of grief too for what I lost to false “diagnoses” and what are essentially experimental “treatments” (what else can you call “treatments” which are untested and unproven for long term use?). I have to say that since I saw through those lies about permanent brain “diseases”, despite the grief and loss and disabilty from the drugs and abuse in the system, I feel a million times better than I did when I believed the lies.
Louise, I completely agree -it’s not just the physical health effects of the drugs which are so damaging, but the way they chemically sever us from our bodies. Numbing emotions for decades is incredibly harmful and cruel.
For abuse survivors, or anyone I believe, it can prevent us processing experiences, so that effects of past experiences, never get identified or “resolved”. I spent years in the “system” and am only late in life finding ways to manage and process early childhood experiences, along with added traumatic injuries from the system itself. In the past, every time life brought traumatic memories and reactions to the surface I found myself in crisis “care” and given more and more repressive “treatments”, episode after episode. They told themselves it was the progression of whatever “disease” they chose to call it (which were many). This lack of curiosity which is trained into clinicians is criminal negligence in my view.
Effects of past experiences don’t go away with suppression, they get worse and accumulate more severe “post-traumatic” associations and reactions across the life time.
Our feelings and bodies are essential to healing and growth through our experiences – we are denied this by false “diagnoses” and violating interventions.
I agree this is one of the cruellest and most devastating effects of psychiatry’s false paradigm.
I’m so sorry you have had to experience the same realisation, but very glad – as difficult as it is – you are finding a way back to yourself.
I agree – that would be a very revealing study. I think there have been studies and books strongly linking inequality to “mental health”? I even believe that most of us know intuitively, as well as logically, that “mental health” is strongly (if not overwhelmingly) related to social/environmental conditions?
I think we know this and policy makers and politicians know this too, but there is no political will or public pressure to change. Psychiatric and mental health and wellbeing narratives create convenient distractions from social realities which look “too hard” or which we are too tired and anxious and disconnected to take time to recognise and change. Promises of quick easy fixes make immediate sense, when wider issues feel overwhelming.
Unfortunately, ithese so-called fixes are creating their own serious problems as well as preventing us from identifying the real source of our pain and the common-sense, even obvious, actions we could take.
I think the “adjustment disorder” is in our wider systems and culture – not in us, or in our individual brains or minds – but in a culture and systems which are failing to adjust themselves to simple human needs.
You do certainly do that Birdsong. Sorry if I mis-labelled – I was thinking of “poetry” as something that uses words consciously.
I think that it is kind of art – to create a strong impression without shouting. I’ve always believed that art is a powerful kind of activism which changes minds without force. I’m compulsively verbal unfortunately 😀
Birdsong, your poetry always carries a punch – this one really hit home too.
I’m afraid that psychiatry will just reinvent itself as it has in the past , because this purpose is functional in capitalism – or whatever we call the system we are in now.
I hope, tho, that psychiatry is in the process of imploding under the weight of its own absurdity and contradictions…..
Thank you Dr Timimi for your amazing clarity!
Every time we use clinical language about ourselves, in my experience, we can be actually distancing and dissociating ourselves from our own emotions – it’s a way of trying to maintain the facade of control which is culturally expected of us, perhaps?
Clinical language is a way of objectifying ourself, internalising “mental health”/psychiatric ideology – and turning ourselves into self-improvement projects and perpetual “patients”. Or perpetual customers of whatever belief system is selling us perfect control.
We don’t need fixing, we need connecting. Maybe we can stop using pathologising and clinical language with each other, talk about our emotions in normal human terms, explain our difficulties and struggles in plain language?
Steve, I am very sorry that you lost your wife and partner, and have such a difficult health struggle as well.
What you say is so true – just being with someone, listening, and not trying to control them, change them, judge them, or label them is very rare and that kind of connection can be incredibly healing and empowering in my experience.
I think we can get distracted by rehashing the nature/nurture debate quoting pro and con research for ever. The evidence for the direct effects of environmental and social factors on health and wellbeing is replicated, stable and overwhelmingly clear, versus mainly weak, contradictory or speculative biological or other yet-to-be-proven causes.
But social/environmental explanations require complex and careful solutions – they don’t produce money-making cures or easy answers. Unfalsifiable claims of cures for mysterious or speculative causes keep a lot of people in business.
It can be a useful distraction from thinking about things we can actually do something about and change, to keep us believing it’s all in our genes or our “personality”. The next big answer – like “inflammation” or “attachment styles” or “nervous system regulation” are not going to explain the whole picture or fix anything either. We can make a difference in our communities – by connecting and supporting each other. But I can’t “regulate” my nervous system if I’m not in a safe environment. A child can’t be securely attached if its parents have to work five jobs. We can’t control inflammation if we can’t afford a healthy diet or health care or have no control over our work environment. IMO of course 🙂
You’re right Joanna, stigma is subtle, and prejudice can be hidden – I forget that sometimes. What really gets me is when it’s used to just dismiss what we say – ‘you’re angry/upset/passionate/not-credible etc, because of your “pathology”’ – they don’t even have to say it outright because that attitude is just there. Or as you say, it comes out later in people we thought understood us. And that attitude can have real effects on our lives.
Thanks for your very kind compliment- I’m really not always 😀 – we just try don’t we?
Thanks for all your reminders actually, about the complexity of our experiences- it’s been really helpful in understanding and thinking about where I am. What’s clear to you I’m still working out. It’s like coming out of a fog sometimes because the whole story psychiatry ‘sells’ is so powerful and just everywhere!
Re how psychosis-type experiences are possibly becoming more stigmatised-I agree. And I think they are getting more marginalised by the “popularity” of less stigmatised diagnoses so that people forget (or ignore) that there are some diagnoses which can get you legally locked up and force drugged.
Thank you – I wish I was more “noble”, or maybe a goddess! 😀
Joanna has a beautifully hopeful meaning, so appropriate indeed 🙂
Many nurses do seem to become callous and forget we’re human altogether. Some might be overworked, but I’ve met others who were spiteful – I’m sorry you have too, because they can be terrifying when you’re practically helpless. It makes the kind ones more memorable at least!
Joanna, that’s a very good point – it took me years to feel safe enough to talk openly and there are still plenty of circumstances I won’t . As you said earlier – it can be actually unsafe to have other people know our history, or we just don’t need the ignorant attitudes. It is often just rational self-protection to stay silent. It’s true that public stigma can be worse or better in different places too. It seems everyone is talking about having a diagnosis here in Australia, but mostly only the less stigmatised ones!
Tom, thanks for the lovely stories and words which remind me that perspective is so important. I can get tunnel vision at times- like anyone (I hope!)
Some of my most precious experiences are being with people who are struggling and experiencing their grace and generosity in what we might think of as severe adversity. As are my experiences of extraordinary kindnesses of staff when I was struggling.
Altruism and selfishness are too polarised, taking care of ourself is just as important as taking care of each other or humanity, and I don’t see the difference really.
And yes, we owe a huge thank you to Robert Whitaker and Steve and MIA for the way things are changing and for bringing survivor’s voices together with others to raise awareness so powerfully.
I have just looked up the meaning of Joanna’s name 🙂
Thanks for the kind and wonderful words!
Joanna, that is true, often all we can do is just survive and protect our loved ones. And I think support and affirmation of ourselves and each other is just as valuable as campaigning for rights or talking about positions. Just looking after ourself can be a powerfully positive action in itself.
I try to remember we’re all just doing what we can in our own small way, I’m sorry if I seemed to imply anything else 🙂
To put that comment into context Tom, it was based on personal experience with a family member.
On a more positive note – legislation has very recently been changed where I live, to address the overuse of psychiatric drugs causing fatalities in aged care.
This would not have happened without awareness and people talking about it.
I’m hopeful awareness of overmedication practices in mental health and disability care is increasing, there is talk here, but no action yet.
I don’t think that inequality, material disadvantage, or overmedication of vulnerable people, are things beyond my control to change. Its difficult but I can try – that’s hopeful to me.
Overmedication very nearly killed my vulnerable and disabled family member in community care (sedation and respiratory suppression) and is killing unknown others still who don’t have any family to advocate for them.
I don’t believe these things are beyond “our” control to change- as collectives we can share ideas, raise awareness, act as advocates for each other etc. So I will keep thinking and talking about those things if that’s ok 🙂
I’m not sure who “we” is Joanna – I am neither miserable nor powerless nor bitter. As I have said, I find my ideas empowering to me.
I said that the idea of “privilege” is too vague and relative, not that it doesn’t exist. I prefer terms like “poverty” or “isolation” or even “access to resources” which are more specific and there is -usually- some shared consensus on what we are actually about.
If, as you suggest, we should not discuss structural issue on MIA, then I have blundered naively as I thought this was exactly the place to discuss them. But as I’m not a big commenter here I don’t know the rules and conventions of what is acceptable to discuss. I’m not being facetious, but genuinely confused.
Diana, press actually seems worse in Australia (you would be able to compare better than me)- press here is completely dominated by 1 or 2 govt/industry approved and funded “expert opinion” providers.
Joanna – that is very much what I was thinking about.
Thanks for your kind words.
I agree – “privilege” is totally relative (aaarggh!) 😀
I think “privilege” is a bit of an impossible idea to apply to individuals at all. It’s hard to think of it as some “thing” people “have” – someone can be privileged in one way, time or place and not at all privileged in another.
Your comments have been thought-provoking too – I am now thinking about how I can hold both in mind : – that our experience is valuable and important knowledge, and that our experience sits in other contexts which we don’t always have any control over. …. 🙂
Diana, This is what keeps me angry. Those who are too poor, disabled, or isolated to protect themselves at all, or in some (too many) situations, are too disabled and over-sedated to even know what’s being done to them (aged “care”, wards, group homes, under community “treatment” orders…)
I am waiting for class actions…………..
Diana Rose thanks for speaking to this with such insight.
“Choice” is not choice if it’s not *fully* informed , but also if there are no alternatives. And as you say – “informed” is often meaningless when research is non existent and doctors are less informed than their patients.
Drug effects are a devastating reality – not “side” effects- which you have lived so unjustly. Long term effects which you are living with so devastatingly now, are even more unknown and hidden, even in very anti-drug debates.
I’m shocked to hear that “atypicals” have been linked more with drug induced Parkinsonism than first gen neuroleptics.
We need to be sharing information and protesting loudly about every hidden issue related to psych drugs, including “practices” like polypharmacy, which are nothing more than experimentation. Of course protest is limited when we are actually disabled by these practices. Your devastating experiences and the knowledge from them is so important.
Sharing information by survivors is critically important- to real lives and bodies – because of the lack of knowledge in psychiatry, yet often these discussions are shut down by false accusations of “pill shaming”, or polarised by discussions of personal “choice” which obscure the lived reality.
Most of us find out the truth later I suspect – we have been so conditioned to believe that drug (“side”) effects are simply to be expected as some kind of ‘trade off’ – without asking what exactly we are “trading” or why our bodies and health are things we should be expected to trade at all.
I should have said more clearly that I also live in poverty and isolation (my early life was different because it was worse, but I assume that is a common story too). So privilege is not something I assume any one in the system has 🙂
Thank you Joanna, my understandings and perspectives are empowering and helpful to me.
The idea that Robert or you or anyone here is “privileged” was not the meaning of my words, but I understand how they could be interpreted that way. I apologise to Robert for any hurt caused by any careless words.
Thanks Steve and Joanna, I agree with you both and, if I may also be permitted to have a final word, I don’t believe anything I have said contradicts your points 🙂
Jasmine, like Joanna, you seem to be manufacturing arguments to ideas I have not expressed, or which I have already answered. Words can always be cherry picked, decontextualised and reframed.
From what I can tell, the offensive idea seems to be that “access to resources is more likely to affect survival and health outcomes than anything else.”
This is quite a banal and inoffensive idea to me, but of course, anyone is free to disagree. As we are not prosecuting a legal case here, I think disagreement is fine. Or put it down to misunderstanding.
Thanks Joanna, I replied above (glitches again- moslty in my brain!) that I think you might have misread my words, or taken them out of context, or I just have not been very clear. I was not really talking about individual or personal factors at all, which are of course involved.
It seems that we just disagree over the relative importance of those individual and structural factors to individual health.
My own early life experiences, as well as volunteering and working with people who live in poverty and isolation, many without housing, has made those structural barriers to life and health very real to me.
Joanna, I think this discussion is getting falsely polarised.
I think you are taking ideas from a personal perspective which I am trying to discuss from a structural one. Perhaps I have just expressed my ideas badly, or you are misinterpreting – either way there’s no point in me repeatedly responding to arguments about things which I have not actually said..
I am very sorry for what you have experienced and I share your experiences. I assume many of us here share them and understand how devastating they are.
Robert, thanks for your kind reply. I feel very much for your experience, and believe stories like yours should be told – our history as survivors is so important and sharing our experiences of psychiatry is vital to changing things.
I feel too that your pride in surviving is justified and important.
(I have tried to say this a few times but perhaps not clearly enough)
I honestly didn’t think I needed to say to anyone here (because it is so common) that I have experienced the violence of psychiatry in multiple ways, and my own and my loved ones, lives and health, have been devastated by that.
I try to avoid comparing and just assume everyone here has their own story, Looking at the bigger picture, or taking a political view, can be seen as not paying enough attention to personal experiences, because most of us are all so devastated and need to be heard. It’s natural to focus on our own story and to read my comments in a personal light. All of our stories are incredibly important and sharing yours is an act of generosity. As is using your experience to change things.
I’m glad you understand that I am just speaking of different political ways to think about how to change this awful reality.
Thank you for sharing some of your amazing story and how you have survived and made it meaningful.
Solidarity and love to you 🙂
Thanks Joanna, my point is just that access to resources is more likely to affect survival and health outcomes than anything else.
People who are forcibly and legally drugged because of an (unproven) diagnosis – have no option to choose to protect their health. I’m not sure why this even an issue of disgreememt?
It is well known from research that socially and economically disadvantaged people are diagnosed more, with more “serious” diagnoses, and forcibly drugged more.
Talking about survival as if it was a choice is pretty insensitive in my opinion.
In my experience a psychiatric diagnosis, and psychiatric drugs, directly causes a loss of health, job, community and economic security. If you have more resources you have more power to survive that – obviously?
Re Phillip S – I did say that all of us “able to speak here” are *relatively* well off. I work with many people who are so disabled (by psych drugs) and poor they cannot access the internet, or even have the ability to engage in a debate, they are locked in wards or siloed in community “homes” or aged care “homes” where they are so heavily sedated they can’t read.
Economic and social resources don’t protect us from falling into the clutches of psychiatry, but they do offer some choice and protections which you and I and Phillip, obviously have. If I had not been able to advocate for someone close to me, they may well have died, because they were too sedated by over medication to advocate for themsleves. This is not unusual. We just don’t see or hear about it – which is exactly my point.
Robert, I hope no-one has said you “should not” call yourself anything, just raised the idea that using psychiatric language could be contradictory to the aim of making the world a kinder place for people who are seen as different.
As others have said, it is not that people here don’t understand your position, some of us just disagree with it and with what it means.
Your strategy, if I read it right, is to remove discrimination by changing people’s individual beliefs about differences, and their attitudes towards people who seem to have them. Changing the social “value” of those differences. This is could be seen as a position taken by “Mad Pride” advocates.
Another strategy is to question the false claims to “knowledge” of a system which has the power to actually define those differences and code them into structures of material power – like psychiatry. Structures which determine who and how people classified as different can be legally and socially (mis)treated.
My problem with “pride” narratives is that they exclude the many people who do not take pride in their diagnosis – who profoundly disagree with the legitimacy of any psychiatric diagnosis, and who are forced to experience material loss and disadvantage – including loss of human rights, health and resources – because of a label which – crucially- they do not have any choice to refuse or accept.
As hard as your struggle has been, you were able to make the choice not to have psychiatric “treatment”. I’m sure you know not everyone has the power to refuse it.
Having pride in our survival is understandable but ignores and excludes those who failed to survive. It is privileging the lucky survivors in an unequal and inhumane system. In my opinion, those of us who survived (more or less) and can speak here, no matter how hard we feel we have it , are just lucky and lucky enough to have access to material and social resources (however small) which others don’t (who are not speaking here at all).
Thanks Joanna, I very much agree with you – sorry if my reply was a bit confused. I was thinking about how the stigma is so “sticky”.
I’m coming from the idea that stigma – or discrimination which is what it is – is not just a personal attitude, but is created and perpetuated by structural power.
I don’t use my full name – probably pointlessly -for all sorts of privacy reasons
But I think everyone here knows very well that it can still have very serious consequences to be identified as “mad” in certain places and situations, so anonymity is an important, rational action to protect our selves.
Hi Joanna, I would say it is just a matter of a difference in the power and number of the structural barriers that exist (which I think I attempted to list somewhere else on this thread 😀 )
The one you mention – attitudes – are based in lies and myths about incompetence and danger and diseases, those ideas come from somewhere.
Stigmatising attitudes are supported by something (ideology, false narratives, power of medicine, legal and state power).
Other liberation movements faced stigmatising stories and discrimination too.
I think its a major factor that our bodies are still literally not free – we are disabled and poor from harmful drugs and iatrogenic trauma, we can be legally silenced and locked up if we disagree.
And, psychiatry and it’s stories are very convenient. It gives us a simple story for our distress or differences and keeps disturbing people out of the way when they aren’t doing anything which can be called criminal.
I’m probably not explaining well – because it’s The Question isn’t it?
But civil rights movements took time and still have not achieved their goals or full rights – some are going backwards – so it’s not surprising for many reasons.
I think most people haven’t even heard of the survivor movement because any who do speak up are faced c a be discredited and are just faced with the enormous financial legal and cultural power of massive institutions and industries. Even if they don’t have a stigmatising label. This website and Mad in movement is here because of those barriers and how powerful they really are, don’t you think?
Jane, I think it could be said that “trauma” is a construct too.
I think that what most people think of as the “trauma model” has come through simplified versions of this neurobiological narrative .
This is far from the full picture of trauma theory and research – it’s just the bit that has become popularised.
As others suggest here – it is a simplification and falls for the same decontextualised and dichotomised ideas of mind-body which psychiatric dogma does.
I don’t think it is as easy to separate mind and body as you suggest, or to separate bodies from social and material contexts. I don’t think even Van Der Kolk would claim that it’s a simple cause-event-to-biological-effect linear process.
All trauma theory repeatedly emphasises that the effects of events are critically mediated by environmental, social and relational factors.
Early trauma theory was primarily focused on social and psychological framings.
I think the intense focus on the “biological” aspect of trauma discourse is perhaps caused by both the power of psychiatry in controlling and shaping the dominant “biologised” framework – and the popularity that these kinds of explanations have in reducing everything to simplistic mechanistic metaphors. Anything to avoid thinking about the full social implications of how we treat each other (particularly those with less power and resources – like children) and the wider political implications of that.
Birdsong, I have also thought that the power of psychiatry is rooted in language. The material power of legal control over bodies, is dependent on the ongoing cultural power and legitimacy which is based in the power to control language. As you say, stunningly – in weaponised metaphors and linguistic deception.
I think Szasz talked about psychiatry as rhetoric?
(Thanks for your kind reply too!)
Thank you Rosalee,
There is a long lived movement called the “psychiatric survivor movement” – used as an umbrella term by a lot of us.
It’s fragmented and silenced by the structural barriers which prevent us getting attention and traction –
As you said this is due to stigma and discrimination – largely promoted and maintained by clinical attitudes and beliefs and the structural, cultural and narrative-controlling power that psychiatry has as a profession.
The actual power of psychiatry is the power to silence people and to lock them up and drug them.
Legal and material power to control both our bodies and our voices is what sustains and causes the stigma. Stigma is a product of this ability to inflict violence ( which is what I think we need to call it), not the cause of it in my opinion.
Many are working hard to raise awareness of the harms of psychiatry, I have seen #iatrogenicharm, #psychiatricharm and others. Don’t have public awareness enough – most have no idea of the reality.
But we keep going and connecting in places like this!
Christine, thanks for your reply. I honesty don’t follow Van Der Kolk that much and had mixed agreement with the book I’ve found some of his talks helpful. I didn’t see your comment as critical of him at all, I am just fascinated too by how people form their beliefs and how we hold onto them.
I think, the baggage stays I reckon, it’s our attitude to it which we can change.
I too have experienced the time it takes to understand and make sense of painful experiences, it takes time to uncover how our experiences have affected us – this is not a mysterious or difficult to understand process – it’s not about “false memories” or being brainwashed by ‘trauma talk’ either – it’s human nature to avoid change and avoid pain. We live in a culture which does every thing it can to avoid and “dissociate” from pain or discomfort. We have a whole “mental health” industrial complex built around controlling and containing emotions. We learn to cope with pain by putting it away – this isnt mysterious either – we “dissociate” /separate unpleasant feelings and ideas all the time (i find “dissociate” more descriptive and broader than “repress”).
Children tend to do this more because they have less resources to manage mental conflict or pain. They become good at it if they have no support or other options – so of course, it can take years to uncover this – or sometimes a shock or stress will unearth it (then they will be drugged or force to suppress it again with chemical dissociation.)
What I have learned about those who claim to have “cures” for anything, including and especially, for “trauma”, is that most are just selling something. Psychiatry in particular, but – ironically – it has missed the boat completely – and really is left catching up (or pretending to, with “trauma-informed “ rhetoric etc.)
The proliferation of therapies and theories and “trauma discourse” we’re bombarded with now are just opportunism, marketing, or downright fraud. Some really believe they have the answers – because it worked for them.
The fact is we are not dealing with a single condition or experience – just as with any other so-called “mental health issue”.
People continue to make this mistake.
Thanks for your thoughts – we need to trust our own perceptions as the “truth” for “now”, without attaching to the ideas of others, or even our own too much . I have felt so much better in so many ways since realising this!
This is such a long thread I have missed many comments! Thank you for making this point Rosalee.
Sometimes we are so – justifiably – enraged by our own experience that we forget they are common and ongoing.
We forget that people are dying (uncounted and unacknowledged) from the decades of continuing refusal to admit the harms of dangerous drugs and drug practices. Sustained by the ubiquitous dehumanising attitudes which are the direct result of the lies of the narrative of “diseases” and “illness”.
This can happen to the most privileged, and we – who have the privilege of speaking here- do not know about the lives lost or ruined – who have no support, no resources, no way to advocate for themselves.
Thank you Rosalee,
I’m so so sorry for what happened to your brother and you, heartbroken to be honest. My own brother nearly died of over-medication which supressed his respiration- Side effects which are well known of each of the drugs he was on. I raised this with his support service for months. His psychiatrist even (callously and casually) mentioned to me she thought he was not going to live much longer, but still could not see that it was the drugs. They simple expect people to die and imagine it’s the illness. He was only 50 then. I could not get them to listen to me while he was just totally sedated, unresponsive and completely unable to help himself or advocate for himself for over 2 years – which they explained to themselves was just the “illness”. The lack of simple curiosity or any interest for our rights to health shows the extreme dehumanisation of their perceptions of people like us. When he nearly died, finally his meds were reviewed by the hospital. He is now completely himself again. No one apologised, no one admitted what had happened to him for 2 years of his life, no one even recognised they had nearly killed him. I am so very sorry for your loss. I am still haunted by the thought of many others neglected and dying this way, with no care or even imagination for them live a normal and active life.
I also know that extreme powerlessness which happens when you find out you have been (falsely) pathologised and you are subjected to discrimination in other health services because of it. The secrecy is quite common I have been told by a nurse..I don’t know if it is just utter contempt for our rights or an inability to see us as having a consciousness at all?
Solidarity and love to you Rosalee!
Hi Jasmine, I didn’t forget, I just didn’t think it was relevant.
I was talking about diagnostic language. The word “mad” is not a diagnosis.
I don’t really think that expressing disagreement is infringing on anyone’s right to perform “acts of radical narrative reclamation”.
I do dispute your definition of “radical” – upgrading to a narrative which simply reinforces the dominant psychiatric narrative is not radical and does not challenge the structural basis of psychiatric power. I have already said that is perfectly valid to feel good about surviving a diagnosis, but it is not our responsibility to uphold a false narrative to support an individual choice – we can respect as well as disagree with it.
Meanwhile I believe that kindness respect and sensitivity can go both ways . Some, if not all speaking here have our own stories of lifetimes of psychiatric violence and I tend to assume that everyone’s knowledge has been just as hard won.
Performative politeness – which is what you are asking for – is no more kind than honesty and respect for others’ intelligence.
I’d rather think about how to change the narrative than reclaim it and how to protect my loved ones, myself and others from more damage than engage in symbolic flag waving to be honest.
Hi Christine,
I believe it’s very embedded in our ‘nature’ to avoid changing our opinions as much as possible. We just crave certainty and predictability. Especially if we feel unsafe or under threat – as everyone does these days.
It takes constant watchfulness not to fall back on old, easy assumptions. It especially takes curiosity. We are so focused on defending our position we lose the ability to engage our curiosity. Feeling defensive can switch us out of the state of mind which supports it. Trauma and insecure lives keep us in constant defensive mode so we retreat into our fixed beliefs and positions.
I think Van Der Kolk is experiencing a ‘backlash’ from many quarters – people who put him on a pedestal, and the establishment psychiatrists who have been gatekeeping his work out of the establishment for decades. No scientist can be expected to be perfectly consistent- especially if they are at least trying to adhere to the scientific model, they should change their views.
This is all a bit of a storm in a teacup. He has always been attacked by the establishment psychiatry and, by being a popular author, always been open to all sorts of criticism. Most of us can make up our own minds what’s useful or not. I am grateful to him for his many decades of research in spite of opposition and exclusion by the psychiatric power base.
Traumatic experiences are very Isolating – feeling constantly unsafe – often mostly around other people – can be really lonely. I did have some good therapy too which helped me feel safer around others – just by being a good example of a safe person. I think life experience is so varied that there are no clear answers for what works. We have to try different t things and trust our own feelings amd responses over any expert or professional.
Phillip, that is a very ignorant statement. Psychiatric survivor activism has a long history and continues – although we have made changes in the last 30 years – it is a massive structure we are up against and there are massive structural barriers to overcome:
– all patients are systemically silenced by the myth that we are incompetent- thus our testimony is routinely dismissed and silenced
– most survivors who recognise the harms of the system, through the lies, have been disabled and impoverished and isolated by a lifetime of psychiatrisation and have no resources. Many are barely surviving in dire poverty and extreme disadvantage. Others are languishing in state-“homes” and wards, sedated to the point of helplessness or dying by over medication .
– survivors can be force medicated and incarcerated – dissent is supressed by systematically undermining credibility, or just forcing people onto sedating drugs – often for life
– so-called “mental illness” has been framed as shameful and a moral failing for ever, hidden and not talked about. I am old enough to remember that time. Survivors who speak out had to be incredibly brave. This effectively kept survivors isolated from each other.
– the lie of “brain diseases” is incredibly powerful , backed by the power of medicine and science and the law
– the Mental health industrial complex is a massive industry on which millions of livelihoods depend – vested interests in maintaining the status quo are incalculable
– psychiatry has legal powers other “medicines” do not – psychiatry is convenient to the state and the public in legally containing and controlling people it does not know how to deal with and can’t criminalise
– psychaitry has no scientific basis so any criticism can quickly be incorporated and overcome by a change in rhetoric and framing- this is obvious in its recurring historical shifts – ideological power.
– marketing marketing marketing profit profit profit
Despite this, thanks to sites like MIA and activism all around the world – and the hard work of the pioneers in activism – awareness is growing and more survivors are speaking out. I have worked as a peer supporter to provide advocacy. This resistance is continuously incorporated by the power structure, because that is how they work, but i hope and do see signs of changes in awareness . Now I can only cheer others on and share my experience to support others because of disability from a lifetime of psychiatrisation. We do we can to support each other.
Hi Robert, thanks for your article and your brave actions to challenge and bring to light some of the shameful history of psychiatry. I believe we need to know and remember our history as psychiatric survivors – to recognise the violence is not accidental and that resistance is possible.
Please don’t mistake disagreement with lack of solidarity. It’s so vital for us to share and discuss ideas – even if we don’t agree.
I see diagnostic language as a form of violence – it is used to legitimise actual violence and denial of human rights – as you know. In fact this could be one of its main functions, certainly legally.
So psychiatrised language and diagnostic language can be felt as upholding that system of violence.
I do understand your idea that your use of the term schizophrenic is an assertion of your survival against the pessimistic determinism of psychiatric dogma.
Some people speak of “having a diagnosis of ….” In respect of the fact that most diagnoses are not chosen and that a diagnosis subjects the person to presumptions of “incapacity”, as well as “moral deficit” which still linger, are unfounded, and have real-life consequences.
Language does matter, it’s important to discuss it I think.
Hi Robert, I agree, any challenge to the violence of the psychiatric system it’s important – an apology is a public admission of harm and hopefully an assurance it won’t happen again.
I have a dream of a Human Rights Truth and Reconciliation process to be held on behalf of all psychiatric survivors whose lives have been destroyed by psychiatry. I hope that soon we will see legal actions and class actions towards this.
Psychiatry has been unaccountable for too long for the harm of too many.
Hopefully it could become a process that would recognise and represent all groups and individuals who have been harmed. Truth-telling is essential as well as legal actions to stop this endless cycle.
Dead Soul, I completely agree, and well said.
An interview here discusses how the vast majority of research is invalid – John ioannides.
I especially agree that a lot of research just seems to demonstrate the absurdity of the whole research system – like those studies of harms of involuntary treatment which – as you say – can feel absurd and offensive to people who have been systematically silenced for saying the same thing.
I guess it’s always helpful to know how the sausage is being made in psychiatry-land, and have access to research which supports our goals.
I confess I am a bit mystified by this one, as it really just presents the views of an equally if not more biased (from what I can tell) establishment psych defending his turf.
It’s also relevant I think that trauma research is still largely excluded from establishment psychiatry and does (or did) provide a non-pathologising and empowering alternative to deterministic biological models.
I appreciate your clarity Steve – this is such an important point! – the psychiatric mindset is so embedded that it seems inconceivable to some (including in the legal system) that we are not talking about real things but concepts. Psychiatric diagnostic concepts have achieved an unquestionable mythical status. A status based in the equally unquestionable idea that human experience and behaviour can be divided into kinds which are categorically different in some way. Psychiatric and cultural categories like sane/insane or pathological/normal – are purely conceptual value-based binary oppositions, which have no external referent of any kind. It does my head in how powerful these kinds of concepts can be! I use “mis-diagnosis’ to emphasise that they are all “misdiagnoses” – but I forget that’s not how others understand psych diagnosis. And, as you explain, this misuse of language needs to be clearly challenged because it is what is used as the spurious justification for denying our human rights, including the right to bodily autonomy and choice – and subjects us to dangerous physical interventions – with or without our consent.
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Love this, great read, thank you! Could not agree more!
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Steve, I agree – there is no way to judge anyone’s experience through arbitrarily imposed superficial behavioural and psychological concepts, which are equally as normative (and coercive) as any psychiatric diagnosis. The concept of neurodivergence actually depends on ‘pathologising’ others – (as “neurotypical” or “neuronormative” or whatever the current terminology.)
If the choice is between calling yourself neurodivergent or being labelled (pathologically?) uncaring and inherently oppressive – i question how liberating that ideology can really be.
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Thanks Katie, I identify very much with what you say. It has taken me years to escape the power of that hegemonic narrative over my own identity. And it’s always an ongoing process, when it’s so embedded in our language and culture.
Perhaps that is why some psychiatric survivors might not be eager to embrace another would-be hegemonic (sorry, “paradigmatic” !) interpretion of our experiences?
And an equallly normative ideology (just different norms)!
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So important to make this distinction Steve! All psychiatric diagnoses are mis-diagnosis. And all psychiatric patients are victims of lack of consent – not only because the required legal standards are routinely ignored – but because the research is inadequate and biased, and because all diagnoses are false and unproven. So meaningful informed consent is impossible.
Of course any legal action is valuable in challenging the malpractices of psychiatry – so thank you for taking action Ellen. I would love to see many more actions but many psychiatric survivors are impoverished and disabled by psychiatric mis-treatment.
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Very sadly, deteriorating health, related to psychiatric drugs, is also ignored and blamed on the (unproven) underlying “disease” in mental health services which should be aware of the risks. We need more awareness of the hidden deaths caused by polypharmacy and over medication especially in community services, where isolation (often people without family or under public guardianship have absolutely no advocacy) is contributing to deaths of sheer negligence.
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Flick, this is one of the few spaces where critical perspectives of psychiatric survivors and advocates can be shared and discussed freely and seriously. I would hate to see this vital function shut down through the kind of misuse of terms like epistemic injustice I suggest you are making here.
To claim that simple disagreement with your beliefs is a form of injustice is very harmful in my opinion. In your usage, epistemic injustice can be applied to any situation in which our beliefs are challenged. This is a trivialisation of the concept of injustice.
Preventing the discussion of ideas in the name of “justice” for one group is exactly why identitarian ideologies like ND are problematic. I suggest this kind of usage of the idea of epistemic injustice does not actually support the sharing of alternatives, it suppresses important debate.
I would argue, that psychiatric and institutional power, in fact, overwhelmingly supports neurodivergent ideology including substantial academic advocacy, economic influence, huge popular uptake, as well uptake by specialist discourses like psychology. I suggest this is because it does not threaten the dominant psy-industry narratives. Whereas critical views which threaten psychiatric dominance are demonstrably suppressed, discredited and silenced in public discourse.
People subject to psychiatric power depend on access to critical thinking and ideas to demystify the effects of a psychiatric ideology which often binds them in false and degraded identities, as well as life-destroying mis-treatments. We don’t have to agree with them, any more than someone with a diagnosis of ADHD or Autism has to believe in ND ideology. But we have right to discuss them openly and to be challenged on them equally.
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I have to agree – neurodiversity is also big business. The medicalisation of every inch our lives is enthusiastically supported by an explosion of traditional and alternative health “solutions”. I see the explosion of so-called “neurodevelopmental disorders” as closely related to this too. Commodification has always been the capitalist “solution” to alienation – we are just being sold more imaginary solutions and identities as inequality and precarity intensifies – it’s all part of the same neoliberal capitalist logic.
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Flick, you have referred to this “alternative” ( and somewhat hermetic), neurodivergent knowledge before, however I would like to see the ideas actually spelled out one day. I sometimes think there is an aversion to real debate in neurodivergent ideology? Unfortunately this can look very authoritarian, and can end up cultivating its own exceptionalism through imaginary opposition. How would anyone know?
If you decline to explain how the neurodivergent paradigm differs from the psychiatric biomedical paradigm it’s impossible to know what you are actually saying or what alternative you are actually advocating?
I have read a lot of the people you reference and am not any the wiser. Their ideas seem to be founded on linguistic mystifications – massive generalisations based on very scant, selective cherry-picked “evidence” Politically, their ideas are exactly as this article describes – a retreat into simplistic binaries of good and evil, lacking any structural analysis of how difference is constructed and classed except by an appeal to some unproven innate “differences” which seem to cover the entire range of human experience and behaviour. This kind of politics is just us v them – it’s entirely dependent on the reification of simplistic psychological differences into fixed essentialist identities – with extremely morally coercive overtones.
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Thanks Joe, I really liked the connections you made to the idea of alienation too. I’ve been reading Todd McGowan Embracing Alienation, about how Identities are an attempt to escape alienation. It seems to me that Identitarian movements are often seeking a return to imaginary wholeness and belonging which they assume is in the power of the Other to give, rather than recognising alienation as a condition we all experience, perhaps.
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I for one have definitely read the series and appreciated it and I think I commented on it. My comments are mostly venting – I expect that last one was a bit incomprehensible :D.
I agree the points here are very much the same as that series which was a really comprehensive and much need analysis . I especially appreciated the way you drew out the implications of neuro ideology in the way it further marginalises people with severe disability as well as marginalises the experiences and rights of psychiatric survivors who have been fighting for awareness for so long.
I think those points can never be made too often I guess, when some neurodivergent advocates are trying to claim the epistemic ground from psych survivors and critics – distorting survivor views and experiences as well as blatantly misrepresenting critical psychiatry knowledge.
I just hope more people will recognise that psych survivor interests are not the same- are actually diametrically opposed by neuro ideology – which , despite it’s pseudo-“radical” language, is in complete lockstep with the status quo of psychiatric dominance and has no real understanding of the violent reality of psychiatry which is premised on the same unproven neuro ideology.
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This is the real difference between the critical psychiatric survivor movement and the neurodivergent movement. Neuro ideology aims simply to rearrange the hierarchy of “differences” while keeping the psychopathology paradigm intact. Because neurodivergence is literally unthinkable without the imaginary construction of the “neurotypical” Other, and unthinkable outside the psychiatric paradigm of fixed inherent brain differences.
While neuro ideology vainly tries to separate the “pathology” from a supposed medical science (which is defined by pathologies), many critical psych survivors understand that so-called psychopathologies are not based on any inherent existing “differences”, but on actions of power which arbitrarily define and code differences into fixed diagnoses (and identities).
Many critics have pointed out that the structural and systemic function of psychiatry is not care or medicine -but control – control through redefining social problems as individual problems – blaming individual biology or psychology or individual “differences” for social and political failures. Failures which affect everyone – even if they aren’t aware of them – becuse they are obscured and hidden by the false individualising narratives of psychiatry and others, like the current neurodivergence narrative.
Most psych survivors know that anyone can be labelled “mad” or “mentally ill”, because there is no ontological basis to psychiatric labels. Unfortunately, neuro ideology and even some Mad ideology, clings to the unfounded ontologies of difference which underpin psychiatry’s power and status. Until we deconstruct this structural base of psychiatric power – the power to code difference into social and legal hierarchies – based on false claims to knowledge – there will always be another group, another negative term, another outside the inside of authority and recognition to be reclaimed – or, like the imaginary “neurotypical” – to be vilified and Othered outside the coded hierarchy of acceptable “difference” and identities. Identity is always socially mediated, coded and constructed. Real difference and diversity is a fact of life and outside the codes of power. Rearranging values in hierarchies of difference doesn’t challenge the hierarchy itself- or the power behind it – it flattens human difference into codified classes to be manipulated and rearranged by those with the most power and the loudest voices.
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Exactly! If we need a diagnosis to treat to *some* people better what does that say about how we treat everyone else? Working from the basic assumption that all people and children are sensitive and deserve consideration and respect as individuals is a much less complicated approach than labelling kids with spurious diagnoses before they have even had a chance to fully develop their brain and sense of self.
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Thanks Dan, will read this!
Good question too 🙂
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Myth “ .2. a widely held but false belief or idea.” (Oxford languages).
Psychiatric history is a history of failed theories, barbaric “treatments” and constant reinventions. A history of changing narratives to suit the times and to fend off criticism. Psychiatric ideology is an entirely vacuous pseudo-science – a false belief system, a myth.
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Hey Kevin, thank you, and I’m sure we really would as that connection you made with AI and the DSM was so relevant – some kind of coding system for behavioural management seems to be where an unholy alliance between big data and psy-industries is already heading.
Im in Australia – which calls itself the “lucky country” – so I did think the delusional positivity thing might just be here 😀
Perhaps a kind of performative positivity is now part of the code in all relatively safe and protected nations where we still have some privilege to cling to? The worse neoliberal reality gets, it seems the more self-help and positive psychotherapies teach us to blame our troubles on the “wrong mindset” and “wrong thinking”? If it’s not psychiatry blaming our faulty brains, we have psychology blaming our thoughts and feelings. Just don’t blame the wider systems!
I love the critical thinking on this site tho – perhaps psychiatry survivors are more independent thinkers? Maybe that’s why we end up in the psych system in the first place – we’re asking too many questions?
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Thanks Kevin , I have been called pessimistic, but I’m just channeling Orwell etc 😀
Some animals are always more equal than others in any hierarchical system- so it can’t be good when pseudo-scientific technocrats appoint themselves the power to decide human value.
I think critical thinking is just never needed by those with power. And agree, some of the usual critical thinkers have less to say. I wonder if the focus on identities, rather than structures, of inequality just reinforces hierarchical thinking and supremacist ideas? Ideologues use identity narratives to suppress critical thinking – so critical ideas seem to have be sidelined by exercises in pointing fingers at others while trying to avoid a finger being pointed at yourself. Mutual in/out-group dehumanisation supports structural dehumanisation perhaps?
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Thanks Bill, liked the article about the legal system and was thinking about it – systems are just not designed to care about people, only to perpetuate themselves. Will be looking at other links. Returning to connection-focused ways of living seems almost impossible sometimes, tho I think just sharing ideas can make a difference.
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John, great thought-provoking comment, thanks – final stage human as resource and Huxley quote are chillingly too real. As people are queuing up for diagnoses, it seems we are voluntarily giving over the power to classify and assign human value to unaccountable pseudo-scientific technocrats. With AI refining the process of coding human behaviour into units of production and control.
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Kevin, I agree – it’s like watching animals queuing up to be tagged at the slaughterhouse. It doesn’t seem like a great time to have a psychiatric label. Historically, attempts at arbitrary biological classification systems don’t end well- they end up as moral justifications for supremacy and violence.
While ‘neurodevelopmental disorder” is being marketed as the “soft” version of “mental illness” – in reality it’s exactly the same product being sold – simplistic unproven biological explanations for normal human differences. Difference which can easily be stigmatised in exactly the same way as so-called mental illnesses.
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Dan, I think this is so important and supported by research into effects of childhood adversity, but obviously adversities at any age as well. Children in families with poverty and stress are more exposed to trauma. There are material realities – economic reality being primary in this culture – that limit choices and affect human behaviour from birth imo. Most people in the criminal and mental health systems are disproportionally affected by trauma, poverty and other social exclusionary factors like race. Even extreme, narcissistic behaviour is believed to be a reaction to trauma. It’s hard not to end up in nature/nurture debates like biological v social determinants, but social determinants seem to be at least as critical to individual psychology as any other factors, tho I suspect it’s too complex an interrelationship to be covered by any simple model.
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Marc, There is biology in every human behaviour, feeling and reaction.
Again, as per many other comments here, that is not proof of mental illness, or proof of anything at all.
Your statements are not arguments, they are repetitions of the same point without change. Unlike everyone else here, you believe you can force your opinions on others with pointless name-calling, pointless repetition, and rage. I call that extreme.
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Dan, too scarily similar to the real world 😀
Would def require a panel of commentating professionals to analyze the gaslighting, and 2 psychiatrists on stand-by to sign the documents as contestants are hauled off.
Maybe call it Crazymaking by numbers?
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Dan, I agree – systemic ideas take the focus off individual psychologies, individuals have only so much power and choice, and choice is not evenly available to everyone.
Micro and macro systems support and sustain each other and shape each other. The patriarchal nuclear family unit is a product of culture and history, it’s not universal. One theory is that it formed in the Industrial Revolution due to need for mobile labor forces to move to cities and support factories.
I think psychology is deeply affected and shaped by institutional structures. Rigid and established structures have a lot more power to do the shaping of individual psychologies than vice versa – by rewarding certain behaviours and punishing others according to whether the behaviour supports the needs of the system to continue and survive.
I see the patriarchal nuclear family as another institutional structure – it does have a very central role in creating helpful or harmful models of relationship that shape individual psychology. But families exist in wider systems in which raising children is seen as private and exclusive to the isolated nuclear family. Caregiving is also economically devalued, so caregivers are structurally isolated and have no support. I think this creates so much stress on nuclear family relationships that can have deep adverse affects on individual psychology.
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Marc, putting aside the meaningless labels you’re slinging, I think you are struggling to accept that other people just have a different opinion to you. All of your arguments are forms of apologism – “yes it’s not perfect, but…what can we do?”
“It’s not perfect” is another logical fallacy – you’ve just concealed and dismissed a hell of a lot important issues with that statement.
How is it not perfect? Why is it not perfect? What effect is that having on people while we wait for reforms that never come, or that immediately revert back to same basic model of mistreatment?
As Steve said, no one is denying suffering, or science.
Psychiatric “science” does not stand up. Psychiatric scientism is actually just marketing. Its claims to truth contradict the scientific model in using constructs that are unfalsifiable.
I disagree with psychiatry on the basis that its fundamental premises are wrong. And that those fundamental premises are harmful. Logically, the solution to that is abolition, regardless of all the dust and distractions thrown up by defenders of psychiatry.
The fundamental premise that there will be, in the future, some discovered biological basis to things called “mental illness” is wrong – unproven and unfalsifiable.
The fundamental premise that some behaviours can be classified as “illness” and others as “not illness” is wrong – attempts at nosology continuously fail to meet basic scientific requirements of validity and reliability.
The fundamental premise that the system will eventually reform itself is wrong – see – a history of routinely denying the reality of patient experiences and systematically co-opting criticism with lip service, superficial reforms.
The rest is all wishful thinking and marketing, smoke and mirrors.
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Dan, thanks for sharing that essay – I completely agree. When a power-based (perhaps?) sick system scales up, then human to human connection and reciprocity becomes more and more difficult. And the system will automatically reward and support behaviour which supports the system – individualism, competition, and power-seeking. While discouraging connection, community and reciprocity. In the extractive, transactional logic of the system vulnerability and connection are pathologised as weakness, rather than understood as a fundamental reality of existence. We’re encouraged to call normal human reactions and differences symptoms of biological brain glitches – to be repaired by technocrats – rather than recognise them as meaningful responses to systematic dehumanisation.
I agree with Birdsong that choosing power over connection is a sick response to a sick system. But I also find it really helpful to understand just how sick the system is, because we are systematically taught to blame ourselves by almost every psy-technology there is.
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Birdsong, work in progress for me – getting out from under the cult brainwashing takes work – it’s so embedded -especially if we’ve been squashed by other power-based systems – like family – before psychiatry perfected the technology!
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Marc, not talking about things is not the solution. You’re basically saying things are so bad we should just stop talking about them. Same with psychiatry, you’re saying there is no point discussing change because we don’t agree. A lot of people here actually do agree. Basically when you use those arguments, you’re just asking people not to discuss anything because you have it all worked out. That’s not discussion , that’s shutting down discussion and ideas. You’re just saying I’m ok with it, while denying the reality of people who do experience severe harm in the psychiatric system.
And those people have worked out that it is the model psychiatry is using to explain human behaviour which is causing that harm. That’s worth discussing I think. Just defending the model because it works for you is asking the rest of us to pretend we haven’t experienced any harm – which is a lie – and is the lie that psychiatry depends on to keep causing harm with impunity and with the same unaccountability it has now. Silence is very convenient to any unaccountable power and you’re basically saying don’t talk about it because it’s divisive and we can’t do anything about it. That’s just denial of reality disguised as pragmatism.
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Dan Nelson, i like you analysis. I think it’s part of the logic of systems to value and reward control, so it’s likely if you conform to the needs of systems you have an ability to be impermeable to others and prefer control over connection?
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Non-productive emotions and experiences are increasingly being funneled into professionalised emotion-containment systems, effectively closing off the once common spaces of genuine human connection and community.
Normal human reactions and emotions are now barely tolerated in our cultures unless they are framed and validated as “symptoms” of an official “disorder”- to be contained by a process of systematic emotional neglect, abandonment and dehumanisation – which is masked by the rhetoric of ‘health care’ and ‘medicine.’
Once you recognise the systematic gaslighting of mental ‘health’ industries in which neglect and abuse is reframed as care – you can’t unsee the harm being done by this lie.
I have to share this link because I get a lot of cathartic enjoyment in the compassion and humour of this podcaster. As well as clarity, understanding and de-shaming of my own experiences of gaslighting and abuse in family and psychiatric systems.
They use politics and philosophy to demystify the effects of emotion-phobic corporate capitalism on our ability to feel and connect.
On the weaponisation of forced positivity: The Loneliness Industry Podcast:
https://youtu.be/hj-G-qpmYJA
Content warning – sweary humour 😀
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Steve, 100%
It’s a mythology. It’s so weird that a lot of psychiatrists actually believe it which makes it a belief system and a cult as well as Laura Delano said!
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Arj, I think that’s why there is no point in asking for change from a specialty which is simply not designed for or founded in premises or principles of care, health or human needs.
As you say – there are other choices, as long as psychiatry controls the narrative of human nature and human suffering, those choices are limited.
If psychiatry claims to be a science, then it needs to prove that the science is valid. If psychiatry claims to be a health service then it needs to prove it’s services actually meet people’s needs.
I don’t see psychiatry as capable of doing any of these things effectively – has in fact totally failed to fulfill either of these functions.
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Arj, I think I’ve said I completely agree with you – psychiatry is causing untold harm for no purpose. I am fully in support of its complete abolition and replacement from a ground-up shared understanding of what exactly we think psychiatry is “treating” (nothing- is my answer) and what we think actual “care” and health really means for whole people with bodies and minds and needs and rights.
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Gary, it’s helpful for me to read others ideas here too – i even find others’ anger is all validating and part of the process of getting free of psychiatry’s gaslighting and scapegoating. But there’s no point directing it at each other if we can help it. ideas help me think my way out of the blame psychiatry directs at us. As you say, psychiatry is based on the worst form of ingnorance and fear so sharing ideas can only help.
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Bill, i really don’t understand your replies to my comments. Firstly I’m not angry enough? Now I’m too angry?
What exactly is it you are trying to say, because I cant really identify any actual point or purpose to your comments?
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Understanding psychiatry as part of a wider system does not exonerate it from anything.
I agree psychiatry created itself, it did this by exploiting a need of society to control inconvenient populations and then creating a perception of need in the middle classes. It’s survives by being useful – by reinforcing the dominant values of capitalism and punishing or pathologising behaviour which doesn’t fit the needs of the wider systems which give it license and power to operate.
Psychiatry would not have the power and status it has now if it did not perform a function which is useful to the state and society. Understanding why psychiatry exists and survives is crucial to getting rid of it I think.
I’m not here to get angry, I’m here to understand how it works so we can change it.
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What’s with the rage? Techno-authoritarianism is the same thing.
At least try to make a distinction between who or what to be enraged at.
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Marc, I’m so tempted to agree 😀
Maybe it’s that our system rewards some types of behaviour more than others? It’s actually pretty sane to be struggling with emotions and reactions in our current culture, so why is it that the people who do get pathologised?
One reason I think change is slow is that powerful systems like capitalism – any hegemonic system – tends to split and divide interest groups against each other and make solidarity difficult because we depend on the system to survive. Plus a lot of psychiatric survivors are disabled, poor, isolated, drugged or locked up, so organization is a problem!
I do think the survivors movement has come a long way -when you consider that most of us could be locked up and forced medicated with absolutely no unaccountability not long ago, and the protections and accountability hasn’t improved much now. So it’s a wonder we’ve been able to get our voices heard at all really. ( Thanks to sites like this one, and to other survivors, groups and movements in the past.)
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I’m amazed people forget the eugenics ideology when talking about biologically determined differences in behaviours emotions etc. It hasn’t really changed- now stigma is blamed on public ignorance, not the industry actually churning out the mythology it’s based on. With authoritarianism increasing globally it’s a scary time to be branded with a made-up label based on unfalsifiable theories of inherent biological differences.
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Thanks Arj, I think our culture just doesn’t value human emotions – especially not the kinder ones, they’re seen as weakness, and non-productive, so normal emotional reactions are pathologised.
Psychiatry didn’t create the system, it just reflects the same dominant values and enables them to be maintained.
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Marc, I agree with Steve, there are so many options which we don’t actually have while psychiatry is still defining what we need (what it can get away with “providing”).
I’m one of those millions and I expect many of us here are. We could better get our needs met focussing on what needs to change to create a system that actually serves people’s real needs, and doesn’t create isolation, disability and poverty in the first place.
Inside the narrrow psychiatric model – whose needs are actually being met? Certainly not the most disadvantaged and disabled I’d say – the people who have the least ability and power to make their needs heard are too drugged, isolated, disabled and impoverished.
It’s clear that you don’t feel you’re getting what you need – I wonder, does anyone? Is psychiatry even about providing care or meeting needs at all? Such a large number of us are actually disabled and isolated by the supposed “treatment” itself. Who is the model actually serving?
To me it does not look like the purpose of psychiatry is care, or health – it looks like it’s simply controlling and containing a population with a minimal fig leaf of “medicine” and “care” for optics which satisfies the public who don’t know or need to know the reality. It allows societies and those in power to keep ignoring the problems they cause, and to avoid addressing the understandable human reactions and difficulties people sometimes need help with.
I think we deserve more and we won’t get it if we keep accepting crumbs to keep this or that group of patients or service users quiet with a change of rhetoric, or new increasingly reductive and limited service models which actually serve no-one.
The mental health and psychiatric systems are designed to meet the needs of the system, not the needs of people.
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Hey Arj, I agree with you. I think that psychiatry should be fully abolished. It’s not medicine, it’s not care, it’s not anything except a system that perpetuates itself with lies and stories about unproven biological differences. If you deconstruct this basic assumption of psychiatry: that human behaviour and emotions can be contained in a simplistic model, psychiatry loses its relevance and purpose.
As much as we try to make psychiatry more humane, I think that will be resisted by psychiatry. Because its entire medical, social and legal function and powers, exist in this concept of essential biological differences, and a vague concept of “mental”, which only psychiatry has the “expertise” to understand and “treat.”
Once that goes – psychiatry unravels.
Then we can decide what real care and support looks like – mind altering drugs can become an informed choice and can be prescribed by any practioner.
Any actual neurological problems – like Alzheimers can be treated by an actual evidence based neurological specialty.
Social support and care can be focused on social conditions and solutions and dependent on needs and choices led by the person.
I’m over simplifying, but I think we need to ask what functions psychiatry is fulfilling and whether there are other ideas and services which can do this better.
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Thanks Gina, I confess it’s not mine and comes from survivor researcher Diana Rose. I agree it’s critical to recognise this because the abuses of human rights psychiatry is allowed to perpetrate are dependent on this idea that we are unable to “know”. And our ability to know, is what the dominating knowledge field called psychiatry refuses to recognise. While it is commonly understood in other medical-health contexts that patient knowledge, let alone consent, should be included in some way (regardless of variability in actual practices)-.
I think this is critical to understanding that psychiatry is not actually a legitimate form of medicine which conforms to standard medical conventions, and that its purpose and function is not “health-care”.
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I love how this article centres on needs of patients and psychiatric survivors.
Usually we have experts telling us their ideas of what we need and then expecting us to fit into their framework.
What I get from this is just how powerful the idea of survivors and service users and patients leading the discussion is.
While experts might have similar ideas, the authority of patient and survivor knowledge is much more powerful to me. Both as a narrative and as rooted in the central issue of how our bodies are treated.
We need to keep centring survivor knowledge if we are going to change things in my opinion. If we don’t any future solutions based solely on other forms of knowledge/authority will risk being harmful.
Survivor/patient/service user knowledge needs to be recognised as knowledge, not just a perspective (which can be ignored).
This means survivor knowledge should lead discussions focused on care and treatment. Just like any other model of service or care should.
If anything I see a lot of current debate as a battle for power and meaning which has little to do with care but is focused on controlling the narrative to maintain existing power structures and the authority and legitimacy of those structures.
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Me too, Birdsong, diagnoses have become commodities now to go with commodified identities. I think it is a generational change. People have grown up now in a totalising psy-dominated reality.
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….And how psychiatry really is the new religion.
Try to question “diagnosis” these days and you will be cast as a heartless heretic who is advocating mass murder. People are preaching diagnoses with evangelical conviction in some places. It’s so out of control, I wonder if it’s the product of a generation brought up to believe the values of neoliberalism are all there is – especially with social media reflecting it back to us constantly? They seem to need some kind of explanation for why they’re not the “successful” images they see around them?
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: D It really is! Simple ideas sell better maybe?
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I agree, it’s no coincidence. Psychiatry has been playing this game from its beginnings – as long as it’s indispensable to powerful interests it will survive by adapting its ideology to currrnt demands. Foucault said that madness is defined as whatever behaviours contradict or undermine the core values of the dominant ideology. When the dominant ideology was religion, mystical visions were accepted as real. Now the dominant ideology is individualism and free markets anyone that doesn’t treat themselves like a commodity or reacts to inhumane systems with distress or anger or confusion is mad perhaps?
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getoflex, I’m glad you’re finding a way out. I’m in exactly same situation- and there’s no support if you want to stop the drugs either, I’m struggling just to find a psych to deprescribe me. So we can still be effectively trapped and deprived of our legal right to bodily autonomy even when we are not under any kind of legal treatment order. It’s a total stitch up based on the completely unjustified belief that psychiatrists have some mysterious power to predict future behaviour. I’m finding ways to help myself too and just connect with others going thru the same things. I really think sharing information and ideas is the way to escape the psychiatric hegemonic hold over our reality.
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I think that the article probably couldn’t cover everything. I also think that it’s contradictory to conflate a drug-induced effect with a supposed “disease” like “schizophrenia” which is believed to be caused by an inherent brain dysfunction. If “schizophrenia” can be induced then the biological model of permanent life-long “disorders” is wrong. It’s more likely that so-called “schizophrenia” has many causes which can create reactions that look like what we call psychosis. Calling these kinds of reactions a single “conditon/disorder/disease” is not actually clarifying or helping anything and in fact is misleading psychiatrists into using blunt hammers to drive in imaginary nails.
Calling substance use a “disorder” removes the individual reasons which might make people use any substance – prescribed or unprescribed, legal or not – this doesn’t help anyone identify why they are using – for eg unmet emotional needs – or how they can get those needs met in other ways when substance use creates its own problems. Even alcohol use has negative effects on mood and anxiety so legalisation is not the problem.
In my opinion the effects of cannabis use are the same as other drugs – including psychiatric drugs – they can change and affect our brains in desirable and undesirable, more or less permanent, ways which are yet to be understood and should all be treated with the same caution. And promoting any of them as “safe and effective” is dangerously misleading.
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Yes. Exactly! Psychiatry is the other side of the neoliberal narrative of individualism, success and control. The place where abuse, pain, “failure”, and loss of control gets blamed and reframed as brain differences and “illness” by pathologising emotions and calling them “symptoms”.
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Exactly, Louise, we are individuals responding to life in our own ways with various resources, strengths and vulnerabilities. I’m so sorry you have been treated with denial and pathologisation by people close to you. It can make it so much harder for us to get out from under the false psychiatric narrative and start finding our own solutions. It takes a lot of courage to go against what everyone’s trying to force on you. I feel a lot of grief too for what I lost to false “diagnoses” and what are essentially experimental “treatments” (what else can you call “treatments” which are untested and unproven for long term use?). I have to say that since I saw through those lies about permanent brain “diseases”, despite the grief and loss and disabilty from the drugs and abuse in the system, I feel a million times better than I did when I believed the lies.
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Louise, I completely agree -it’s not just the physical health effects of the drugs which are so damaging, but the way they chemically sever us from our bodies. Numbing emotions for decades is incredibly harmful and cruel.
For abuse survivors, or anyone I believe, it can prevent us processing experiences, so that effects of past experiences, never get identified or “resolved”. I spent years in the “system” and am only late in life finding ways to manage and process early childhood experiences, along with added traumatic injuries from the system itself. In the past, every time life brought traumatic memories and reactions to the surface I found myself in crisis “care” and given more and more repressive “treatments”, episode after episode. They told themselves it was the progression of whatever “disease” they chose to call it (which were many). This lack of curiosity which is trained into clinicians is criminal negligence in my view.
Effects of past experiences don’t go away with suppression, they get worse and accumulate more severe “post-traumatic” associations and reactions across the life time.
Our feelings and bodies are essential to healing and growth through our experiences – we are denied this by false “diagnoses” and violating interventions.
I agree this is one of the cruellest and most devastating effects of psychiatry’s false paradigm.
I’m so sorry you have had to experience the same realisation, but very glad – as difficult as it is – you are finding a way back to yourself.
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That’s a lovely way of explaining it 🙂
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I agree – that would be a very revealing study. I think there have been studies and books strongly linking inequality to “mental health”? I even believe that most of us know intuitively, as well as logically, that “mental health” is strongly (if not overwhelmingly) related to social/environmental conditions?
I think we know this and policy makers and politicians know this too, but there is no political will or public pressure to change. Psychiatric and mental health and wellbeing narratives create convenient distractions from social realities which look “too hard” or which we are too tired and anxious and disconnected to take time to recognise and change. Promises of quick easy fixes make immediate sense, when wider issues feel overwhelming.
Unfortunately, ithese so-called fixes are creating their own serious problems as well as preventing us from identifying the real source of our pain and the common-sense, even obvious, actions we could take.
I think the “adjustment disorder” is in our wider systems and culture – not in us, or in our individual brains or minds – but in a culture and systems which are failing to adjust themselves to simple human needs.
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You do certainly do that Birdsong. Sorry if I mis-labelled – I was thinking of “poetry” as something that uses words consciously.
I think that it is kind of art – to create a strong impression without shouting. I’ve always believed that art is a powerful kind of activism which changes minds without force. I’m compulsively verbal unfortunately 😀
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Birdsong, your poetry always carries a punch – this one really hit home too.
I’m afraid that psychiatry will just reinvent itself as it has in the past , because this purpose is functional in capitalism – or whatever we call the system we are in now.
I hope, tho, that psychiatry is in the process of imploding under the weight of its own absurdity and contradictions…..
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Thank you Dr Timimi for your amazing clarity!
Every time we use clinical language about ourselves, in my experience, we can be actually distancing and dissociating ourselves from our own emotions – it’s a way of trying to maintain the facade of control which is culturally expected of us, perhaps?
Clinical language is a way of objectifying ourself, internalising “mental health”/psychiatric ideology – and turning ourselves into self-improvement projects and perpetual “patients”. Or perpetual customers of whatever belief system is selling us perfect control.
We don’t need fixing, we need connecting. Maybe we can stop using pathologising and clinical language with each other, talk about our emotions in normal human terms, explain our difficulties and struggles in plain language?
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Steve, I am very sorry that you lost your wife and partner, and have such a difficult health struggle as well.
What you say is so true – just being with someone, listening, and not trying to control them, change them, judge them, or label them is very rare and that kind of connection can be incredibly healing and empowering in my experience.
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I think we can get distracted by rehashing the nature/nurture debate quoting pro and con research for ever. The evidence for the direct effects of environmental and social factors on health and wellbeing is replicated, stable and overwhelmingly clear, versus mainly weak, contradictory or speculative biological or other yet-to-be-proven causes.
But social/environmental explanations require complex and careful solutions – they don’t produce money-making cures or easy answers. Unfalsifiable claims of cures for mysterious or speculative causes keep a lot of people in business.
It can be a useful distraction from thinking about things we can actually do something about and change, to keep us believing it’s all in our genes or our “personality”. The next big answer – like “inflammation” or “attachment styles” or “nervous system regulation” are not going to explain the whole picture or fix anything either. We can make a difference in our communities – by connecting and supporting each other. But I can’t “regulate” my nervous system if I’m not in a safe environment. A child can’t be securely attached if its parents have to work five jobs. We can’t control inflammation if we can’t afford a healthy diet or health care or have no control over our work environment. IMO of course 🙂
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You’re right Joanna, stigma is subtle, and prejudice can be hidden – I forget that sometimes. What really gets me is when it’s used to just dismiss what we say – ‘you’re angry/upset/passionate/not-credible etc, because of your “pathology”’ – they don’t even have to say it outright because that attitude is just there. Or as you say, it comes out later in people we thought understood us. And that attitude can have real effects on our lives.
Thanks for your very kind compliment- I’m really not always 😀 – we just try don’t we?
Thanks for all your reminders actually, about the complexity of our experiences- it’s been really helpful in understanding and thinking about where I am. What’s clear to you I’m still working out. It’s like coming out of a fog sometimes because the whole story psychiatry ‘sells’ is so powerful and just everywhere!
Re how psychosis-type experiences are possibly becoming more stigmatised-I agree. And I think they are getting more marginalised by the “popularity” of less stigmatised diagnoses so that people forget (or ignore) that there are some diagnoses which can get you legally locked up and force drugged.
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Thank you – I wish I was more “noble”, or maybe a goddess! 😀
Joanna has a beautifully hopeful meaning, so appropriate indeed 🙂
Many nurses do seem to become callous and forget we’re human altogether. Some might be overworked, but I’ve met others who were spiteful – I’m sorry you have too, because they can be terrifying when you’re practically helpless. It makes the kind ones more memorable at least!
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Joanna, that’s a very good point – it took me years to feel safe enough to talk openly and there are still plenty of circumstances I won’t . As you said earlier – it can be actually unsafe to have other people know our history, or we just don’t need the ignorant attitudes. It is often just rational self-protection to stay silent. It’s true that public stigma can be worse or better in different places too. It seems everyone is talking about having a diagnosis here in Australia, but mostly only the less stigmatised ones!
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Tom, thanks for the lovely stories and words which remind me that perspective is so important. I can get tunnel vision at times- like anyone (I hope!)
Some of my most precious experiences are being with people who are struggling and experiencing their grace and generosity in what we might think of as severe adversity. As are my experiences of extraordinary kindnesses of staff when I was struggling.
Altruism and selfishness are too polarised, taking care of ourself is just as important as taking care of each other or humanity, and I don’t see the difference really.
And yes, we owe a huge thank you to Robert Whitaker and Steve and MIA for the way things are changing and for bringing survivor’s voices together with others to raise awareness so powerfully.
I have just looked up the meaning of Joanna’s name 🙂
Thanks for the kind and wonderful words!
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Joanna, that is true, often all we can do is just survive and protect our loved ones. And I think support and affirmation of ourselves and each other is just as valuable as campaigning for rights or talking about positions. Just looking after ourself can be a powerfully positive action in itself.
I try to remember we’re all just doing what we can in our own small way, I’m sorry if I seemed to imply anything else 🙂
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To put that comment into context Tom, it was based on personal experience with a family member.
On a more positive note – legislation has very recently been changed where I live, to address the overuse of psychiatric drugs causing fatalities in aged care.
This would not have happened without awareness and people talking about it.
I’m hopeful awareness of overmedication practices in mental health and disability care is increasing, there is talk here, but no action yet.
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I don’t think that inequality, material disadvantage, or overmedication of vulnerable people, are things beyond my control to change. Its difficult but I can try – that’s hopeful to me.
Overmedication very nearly killed my vulnerable and disabled family member in community care (sedation and respiratory suppression) and is killing unknown others still who don’t have any family to advocate for them.
I don’t believe these things are beyond “our” control to change- as collectives we can share ideas, raise awareness, act as advocates for each other etc. So I will keep thinking and talking about those things if that’s ok 🙂
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I very much agree Christine!
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I’m not sure who “we” is Joanna – I am neither miserable nor powerless nor bitter. As I have said, I find my ideas empowering to me.
I said that the idea of “privilege” is too vague and relative, not that it doesn’t exist. I prefer terms like “poverty” or “isolation” or even “access to resources” which are more specific and there is -usually- some shared consensus on what we are actually about.
If, as you suggest, we should not discuss structural issue on MIA, then I have blundered naively as I thought this was exactly the place to discuss them. But as I’m not a big commenter here I don’t know the rules and conventions of what is acceptable to discuss. I’m not being facetious, but genuinely confused.
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Steve, me too! By the time we’re old enough to have worked this stuff out, no one wants to listen to us 😀
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Diana, press actually seems worse in Australia (you would be able to compare better than me)- press here is completely dominated by 1 or 2 govt/industry approved and funded “expert opinion” providers.
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Joanna – that is very much what I was thinking about.
Thanks for your kind words.
I agree – “privilege” is totally relative (aaarggh!) 😀
I think “privilege” is a bit of an impossible idea to apply to individuals at all. It’s hard to think of it as some “thing” people “have” – someone can be privileged in one way, time or place and not at all privileged in another.
Your comments have been thought-provoking too – I am now thinking about how I can hold both in mind : – that our experience is valuable and important knowledge, and that our experience sits in other contexts which we don’t always have any control over. …. 🙂
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Diana, This is what keeps me angry. Those who are too poor, disabled, or isolated to protect themselves at all, or in some (too many) situations, are too disabled and over-sedated to even know what’s being done to them (aged “care”, wards, group homes, under community “treatment” orders…)
I am waiting for class actions…………..
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Pam, that was such a gut-punching expression! I love Diana’s accuracy! – Freya (from DTD) in semi anonymity 😀
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Diana Rose thanks for speaking to this with such insight.
“Choice” is not choice if it’s not *fully* informed , but also if there are no alternatives. And as you say – “informed” is often meaningless when research is non existent and doctors are less informed than their patients.
Drug effects are a devastating reality – not “side” effects- which you have lived so unjustly. Long term effects which you are living with so devastatingly now, are even more unknown and hidden, even in very anti-drug debates.
I’m shocked to hear that “atypicals” have been linked more with drug induced Parkinsonism than first gen neuroleptics.
We need to be sharing information and protesting loudly about every hidden issue related to psych drugs, including “practices” like polypharmacy, which are nothing more than experimentation. Of course protest is limited when we are actually disabled by these practices. Your devastating experiences and the knowledge from them is so important.
Sharing information by survivors is critically important- to real lives and bodies – because of the lack of knowledge in psychiatry, yet often these discussions are shut down by false accusations of “pill shaming”, or polarised by discussions of personal “choice” which obscure the lived reality.
Most of us find out the truth later I suspect – we have been so conditioned to believe that drug (“side”) effects are simply to be expected as some kind of ‘trade off’ – without asking what exactly we are “trading” or why our bodies and health are things we should be expected to trade at all.
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I should have said more clearly that I also live in poverty and isolation (my early life was different because it was worse, but I assume that is a common story too). So privilege is not something I assume any one in the system has 🙂
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Thank you Joanna, my understandings and perspectives are empowering and helpful to me.
The idea that Robert or you or anyone here is “privileged” was not the meaning of my words, but I understand how they could be interpreted that way. I apologise to Robert for any hurt caused by any careless words.
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Thanks Steve and Joanna, I agree with you both and, if I may also be permitted to have a final word, I don’t believe anything I have said contradicts your points 🙂
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Jasmine, like Joanna, you seem to be manufacturing arguments to ideas I have not expressed, or which I have already answered. Words can always be cherry picked, decontextualised and reframed.
From what I can tell, the offensive idea seems to be that “access to resources is more likely to affect survival and health outcomes than anything else.”
This is quite a banal and inoffensive idea to me, but of course, anyone is free to disagree. As we are not prosecuting a legal case here, I think disagreement is fine. Or put it down to misunderstanding.
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Thanks Joanna, I replied above (glitches again- moslty in my brain!) that I think you might have misread my words, or taken them out of context, or I just have not been very clear. I was not really talking about individual or personal factors at all, which are of course involved.
It seems that we just disagree over the relative importance of those individual and structural factors to individual health.
My own early life experiences, as well as volunteering and working with people who live in poverty and isolation, many without housing, has made those structural barriers to life and health very real to me.
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Joanna, I think this discussion is getting falsely polarised.
I think you are taking ideas from a personal perspective which I am trying to discuss from a structural one. Perhaps I have just expressed my ideas badly, or you are misinterpreting – either way there’s no point in me repeatedly responding to arguments about things which I have not actually said..
I am very sorry for what you have experienced and I share your experiences. I assume many of us here share them and understand how devastating they are.
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Joanna, I’m so sorry for what you have experienced.. I share your experiences and understand how devastating they can be to our lives.
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Robert, thanks for your kind reply. I feel very much for your experience, and believe stories like yours should be told – our history as survivors is so important and sharing our experiences of psychiatry is vital to changing things.
I feel too that your pride in surviving is justified and important.
(I have tried to say this a few times but perhaps not clearly enough)
I honestly didn’t think I needed to say to anyone here (because it is so common) that I have experienced the violence of psychiatry in multiple ways, and my own and my loved ones, lives and health, have been devastated by that.
I try to avoid comparing and just assume everyone here has their own story, Looking at the bigger picture, or taking a political view, can be seen as not paying enough attention to personal experiences, because most of us are all so devastated and need to be heard. It’s natural to focus on our own story and to read my comments in a personal light. All of our stories are incredibly important and sharing yours is an act of generosity. As is using your experience to change things.
I’m glad you understand that I am just speaking of different political ways to think about how to change this awful reality.
Thank you for sharing some of your amazing story and how you have survived and made it meaningful.
Solidarity and love to you 🙂
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Thanks Joanna, my point is just that access to resources is more likely to affect survival and health outcomes than anything else.
People who are forcibly and legally drugged because of an (unproven) diagnosis – have no option to choose to protect their health. I’m not sure why this even an issue of disgreememt?
It is well known from research that socially and economically disadvantaged people are diagnosed more, with more “serious” diagnoses, and forcibly drugged more.
Talking about survival as if it was a choice is pretty insensitive in my opinion.
In my experience a psychiatric diagnosis, and psychiatric drugs, directly causes a loss of health, job, community and economic security. If you have more resources you have more power to survive that – obviously?
Re Phillip S – I did say that all of us “able to speak here” are *relatively* well off. I work with many people who are so disabled (by psych drugs) and poor they cannot access the internet, or even have the ability to engage in a debate, they are locked in wards or siloed in community “homes” or aged care “homes” where they are so heavily sedated they can’t read.
Economic and social resources don’t protect us from falling into the clutches of psychiatry, but they do offer some choice and protections which you and I and Phillip, obviously have. If I had not been able to advocate for someone close to me, they may well have died, because they were too sedated by over medication to advocate for themsleves. This is not unusual. We just don’t see or hear about it – which is exactly my point.
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Robert, I hope no-one has said you “should not” call yourself anything, just raised the idea that using psychiatric language could be contradictory to the aim of making the world a kinder place for people who are seen as different.
As others have said, it is not that people here don’t understand your position, some of us just disagree with it and with what it means.
Your strategy, if I read it right, is to remove discrimination by changing people’s individual beliefs about differences, and their attitudes towards people who seem to have them. Changing the social “value” of those differences. This is could be seen as a position taken by “Mad Pride” advocates.
Another strategy is to question the false claims to “knowledge” of a system which has the power to actually define those differences and code them into structures of material power – like psychiatry. Structures which determine who and how people classified as different can be legally and socially (mis)treated.
My problem with “pride” narratives is that they exclude the many people who do not take pride in their diagnosis – who profoundly disagree with the legitimacy of any psychiatric diagnosis, and who are forced to experience material loss and disadvantage – including loss of human rights, health and resources – because of a label which – crucially- they do not have any choice to refuse or accept.
As hard as your struggle has been, you were able to make the choice not to have psychiatric “treatment”. I’m sure you know not everyone has the power to refuse it.
Having pride in our survival is understandable but ignores and excludes those who failed to survive. It is privileging the lucky survivors in an unequal and inhumane system. In my opinion, those of us who survived (more or less) and can speak here, no matter how hard we feel we have it , are just lucky and lucky enough to have access to material and social resources (however small) which others don’t (who are not speaking here at all).
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Thanks Joanna, I very much agree with you – sorry if my reply was a bit confused. I was thinking about how the stigma is so “sticky”.
I’m coming from the idea that stigma – or discrimination which is what it is – is not just a personal attitude, but is created and perpetuated by structural power.
I don’t use my full name – probably pointlessly -for all sorts of privacy reasons
But I think everyone here knows very well that it can still have very serious consequences to be identified as “mad” in certain places and situations, so anonymity is an important, rational action to protect our selves.
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Hi Joanna, I would say it is just a matter of a difference in the power and number of the structural barriers that exist (which I think I attempted to list somewhere else on this thread 😀 )
The one you mention – attitudes – are based in lies and myths about incompetence and danger and diseases, those ideas come from somewhere.
Stigmatising attitudes are supported by something (ideology, false narratives, power of medicine, legal and state power).
Other liberation movements faced stigmatising stories and discrimination too.
I think its a major factor that our bodies are still literally not free – we are disabled and poor from harmful drugs and iatrogenic trauma, we can be legally silenced and locked up if we disagree.
And, psychiatry and it’s stories are very convenient. It gives us a simple story for our distress or differences and keeps disturbing people out of the way when they aren’t doing anything which can be called criminal.
I’m probably not explaining well – because it’s The Question isn’t it?
But civil rights movements took time and still have not achieved their goals or full rights – some are going backwards – so it’s not surprising for many reasons.
I think most people haven’t even heard of the survivor movement because any who do speak up are faced c a be discredited and are just faced with the enormous financial legal and cultural power of massive institutions and industries. Even if they don’t have a stigmatising label. This website and Mad in movement is here because of those barriers and how powerful they really are, don’t you think?
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Jane, I think it could be said that “trauma” is a construct too.
I think that what most people think of as the “trauma model” has come through simplified versions of this neurobiological narrative .
This is far from the full picture of trauma theory and research – it’s just the bit that has become popularised.
As others suggest here – it is a simplification and falls for the same decontextualised and dichotomised ideas of mind-body which psychiatric dogma does.
I don’t think it is as easy to separate mind and body as you suggest, or to separate bodies from social and material contexts. I don’t think even Van Der Kolk would claim that it’s a simple cause-event-to-biological-effect linear process.
All trauma theory repeatedly emphasises that the effects of events are critically mediated by environmental, social and relational factors.
Early trauma theory was primarily focused on social and psychological framings.
I think the intense focus on the “biological” aspect of trauma discourse is perhaps caused by both the power of psychiatry in controlling and shaping the dominant “biologised” framework – and the popularity that these kinds of explanations have in reducing everything to simplistic mechanistic metaphors. Anything to avoid thinking about the full social implications of how we treat each other (particularly those with less power and resources – like children) and the wider political implications of that.
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Birdsong, I have also thought that the power of psychiatry is rooted in language. The material power of legal control over bodies, is dependent on the ongoing cultural power and legitimacy which is based in the power to control language. As you say, stunningly – in weaponised metaphors and linguistic deception.
I think Szasz talked about psychiatry as rhetoric?
(Thanks for your kind reply too!)
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Thank you Rosalee,
There is a long lived movement called the “psychiatric survivor movement” – used as an umbrella term by a lot of us.
It’s fragmented and silenced by the structural barriers which prevent us getting attention and traction –
As you said this is due to stigma and discrimination – largely promoted and maintained by clinical attitudes and beliefs and the structural, cultural and narrative-controlling power that psychiatry has as a profession.
The actual power of psychiatry is the power to silence people and to lock them up and drug them.
Legal and material power to control both our bodies and our voices is what sustains and causes the stigma. Stigma is a product of this ability to inflict violence ( which is what I think we need to call it), not the cause of it in my opinion.
Many are working hard to raise awareness of the harms of psychiatry, I have seen #iatrogenicharm, #psychiatricharm and others. Don’t have public awareness enough – most have no idea of the reality.
But we keep going and connecting in places like this!
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Christine, thanks for your reply. I honesty don’t follow Van Der Kolk that much and had mixed agreement with the book I’ve found some of his talks helpful. I didn’t see your comment as critical of him at all, I am just fascinated too by how people form their beliefs and how we hold onto them.
I think, the baggage stays I reckon, it’s our attitude to it which we can change.
I too have experienced the time it takes to understand and make sense of painful experiences, it takes time to uncover how our experiences have affected us – this is not a mysterious or difficult to understand process – it’s not about “false memories” or being brainwashed by ‘trauma talk’ either – it’s human nature to avoid change and avoid pain. We live in a culture which does every thing it can to avoid and “dissociate” from pain or discomfort. We have a whole “mental health” industrial complex built around controlling and containing emotions. We learn to cope with pain by putting it away – this isnt mysterious either – we “dissociate” /separate unpleasant feelings and ideas all the time (i find “dissociate” more descriptive and broader than “repress”).
Children tend to do this more because they have less resources to manage mental conflict or pain. They become good at it if they have no support or other options – so of course, it can take years to uncover this – or sometimes a shock or stress will unearth it (then they will be drugged or force to suppress it again with chemical dissociation.)
What I have learned about those who claim to have “cures” for anything, including and especially, for “trauma”, is that most are just selling something. Psychiatry in particular, but – ironically – it has missed the boat completely – and really is left catching up (or pretending to, with “trauma-informed “ rhetoric etc.)
The proliferation of therapies and theories and “trauma discourse” we’re bombarded with now are just opportunism, marketing, or downright fraud. Some really believe they have the answers – because it worked for them.
The fact is we are not dealing with a single condition or experience – just as with any other so-called “mental health issue”.
People continue to make this mistake.
Thanks for your thoughts – we need to trust our own perceptions as the “truth” for “now”, without attaching to the ideas of others, or even our own too much . I have felt so much better in so many ways since realising this!
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This is such a long thread I have missed many comments! Thank you for making this point Rosalee.
Sometimes we are so – justifiably – enraged by our own experience that we forget they are common and ongoing.
We forget that people are dying (uncounted and unacknowledged) from the decades of continuing refusal to admit the harms of dangerous drugs and drug practices. Sustained by the ubiquitous dehumanising attitudes which are the direct result of the lies of the narrative of “diseases” and “illness”.
This can happen to the most privileged, and we – who have the privilege of speaking here- do not know about the lives lost or ruined – who have no support, no resources, no way to advocate for themselves.
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Thank you Rosalee,
I’m so so sorry for what happened to your brother and you, heartbroken to be honest. My own brother nearly died of over-medication which supressed his respiration- Side effects which are well known of each of the drugs he was on. I raised this with his support service for months. His psychiatrist even (callously and casually) mentioned to me she thought he was not going to live much longer, but still could not see that it was the drugs. They simple expect people to die and imagine it’s the illness. He was only 50 then. I could not get them to listen to me while he was just totally sedated, unresponsive and completely unable to help himself or advocate for himself for over 2 years – which they explained to themselves was just the “illness”. The lack of simple curiosity or any interest for our rights to health shows the extreme dehumanisation of their perceptions of people like us. When he nearly died, finally his meds were reviewed by the hospital. He is now completely himself again. No one apologised, no one admitted what had happened to him for 2 years of his life, no one even recognised they had nearly killed him. I am so very sorry for your loss. I am still haunted by the thought of many others neglected and dying this way, with no care or even imagination for them live a normal and active life.
I also know that extreme powerlessness which happens when you find out you have been (falsely) pathologised and you are subjected to discrimination in other health services because of it. The secrecy is quite common I have been told by a nurse..I don’t know if it is just utter contempt for our rights or an inability to see us as having a consciousness at all?
Solidarity and love to you Rosalee!
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Hi Jasmine, I didn’t forget, I just didn’t think it was relevant.
I was talking about diagnostic language. The word “mad” is not a diagnosis.
I don’t really think that expressing disagreement is infringing on anyone’s right to perform “acts of radical narrative reclamation”.
I do dispute your definition of “radical” – upgrading to a narrative which simply reinforces the dominant psychiatric narrative is not radical and does not challenge the structural basis of psychiatric power. I have already said that is perfectly valid to feel good about surviving a diagnosis, but it is not our responsibility to uphold a false narrative to support an individual choice – we can respect as well as disagree with it.
Meanwhile I believe that kindness respect and sensitivity can go both ways . Some, if not all speaking here have our own stories of lifetimes of psychiatric violence and I tend to assume that everyone’s knowledge has been just as hard won.
Performative politeness – which is what you are asking for – is no more kind than honesty and respect for others’ intelligence.
I’d rather think about how to change the narrative than reclaim it and how to protect my loved ones, myself and others from more damage than engage in symbolic flag waving to be honest.
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Beautifully said Birdsong!
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Hi Christine,
I believe it’s very embedded in our ‘nature’ to avoid changing our opinions as much as possible. We just crave certainty and predictability. Especially if we feel unsafe or under threat – as everyone does these days.
It takes constant watchfulness not to fall back on old, easy assumptions. It especially takes curiosity. We are so focused on defending our position we lose the ability to engage our curiosity. Feeling defensive can switch us out of the state of mind which supports it. Trauma and insecure lives keep us in constant defensive mode so we retreat into our fixed beliefs and positions.
I think Van Der Kolk is experiencing a ‘backlash’ from many quarters – people who put him on a pedestal, and the establishment psychiatrists who have been gatekeeping his work out of the establishment for decades. No scientist can be expected to be perfectly consistent- especially if they are at least trying to adhere to the scientific model, they should change their views.
This is all a bit of a storm in a teacup. He has always been attacked by the establishment psychiatry and, by being a popular author, always been open to all sorts of criticism. Most of us can make up our own minds what’s useful or not. I am grateful to him for his many decades of research in spite of opposition and exclusion by the psychiatric power base.
Traumatic experiences are very Isolating – feeling constantly unsafe – often mostly around other people – can be really lonely. I did have some good therapy too which helped me feel safer around others – just by being a good example of a safe person. I think life experience is so varied that there are no clear answers for what works. We have to try different t things and trust our own feelings amd responses over any expert or professional.
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Phillip, that is a very ignorant statement. Psychiatric survivor activism has a long history and continues – although we have made changes in the last 30 years – it is a massive structure we are up against and there are massive structural barriers to overcome:
– all patients are systemically silenced by the myth that we are incompetent- thus our testimony is routinely dismissed and silenced
– most survivors who recognise the harms of the system, through the lies, have been disabled and impoverished and isolated by a lifetime of psychiatrisation and have no resources. Many are barely surviving in dire poverty and extreme disadvantage. Others are languishing in state-“homes” and wards, sedated to the point of helplessness or dying by over medication .
– survivors can be force medicated and incarcerated – dissent is supressed by systematically undermining credibility, or just forcing people onto sedating drugs – often for life
– so-called “mental illness” has been framed as shameful and a moral failing for ever, hidden and not talked about. I am old enough to remember that time. Survivors who speak out had to be incredibly brave. This effectively kept survivors isolated from each other.
– the lie of “brain diseases” is incredibly powerful , backed by the power of medicine and science and the law
– the Mental health industrial complex is a massive industry on which millions of livelihoods depend – vested interests in maintaining the status quo are incalculable
– psychiatry has legal powers other “medicines” do not – psychiatry is convenient to the state and the public in legally containing and controlling people it does not know how to deal with and can’t criminalise
– psychaitry has no scientific basis so any criticism can quickly be incorporated and overcome by a change in rhetoric and framing- this is obvious in its recurring historical shifts – ideological power.
– marketing marketing marketing profit profit profit
Despite this, thanks to sites like MIA and activism all around the world – and the hard work of the pioneers in activism – awareness is growing and more survivors are speaking out. I have worked as a peer supporter to provide advocacy. This resistance is continuously incorporated by the power structure, because that is how they work, but i hope and do see signs of changes in awareness . Now I can only cheer others on and share my experience to support others because of disability from a lifetime of psychiatrisation. We do we can to support each other.
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Hi Robert, thanks for your article and your brave actions to challenge and bring to light some of the shameful history of psychiatry. I believe we need to know and remember our history as psychiatric survivors – to recognise the violence is not accidental and that resistance is possible.
Please don’t mistake disagreement with lack of solidarity. It’s so vital for us to share and discuss ideas – even if we don’t agree.
I see diagnostic language as a form of violence – it is used to legitimise actual violence and denial of human rights – as you know. In fact this could be one of its main functions, certainly legally.
So psychiatrised language and diagnostic language can be felt as upholding that system of violence.
I do understand your idea that your use of the term schizophrenic is an assertion of your survival against the pessimistic determinism of psychiatric dogma.
Some people speak of “having a diagnosis of ….” In respect of the fact that most diagnoses are not chosen and that a diagnosis subjects the person to presumptions of “incapacity”, as well as “moral deficit” which still linger, are unfounded, and have real-life consequences.
Language does matter, it’s important to discuss it I think.
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Hi Robert, I agree, any challenge to the violence of the psychiatric system it’s important – an apology is a public admission of harm and hopefully an assurance it won’t happen again.
I have a dream of a Human Rights Truth and Reconciliation process to be held on behalf of all psychiatric survivors whose lives have been destroyed by psychiatry. I hope that soon we will see legal actions and class actions towards this.
Psychiatry has been unaccountable for too long for the harm of too many.
Hopefully it could become a process that would recognise and represent all groups and individuals who have been harmed. Truth-telling is essential as well as legal actions to stop this endless cycle.
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Dead Soul, I completely agree, and well said.
An interview here discusses how the vast majority of research is invalid – John ioannides.
I especially agree that a lot of research just seems to demonstrate the absurdity of the whole research system – like those studies of harms of involuntary treatment which – as you say – can feel absurd and offensive to people who have been systematically silenced for saying the same thing.
I guess it’s always helpful to know how the sausage is being made in psychiatry-land, and have access to research which supports our goals.
I confess I am a bit mystified by this one, as it really just presents the views of an equally if not more biased (from what I can tell) establishment psych defending his turf.
It’s also relevant I think that trauma research is still largely excluded from establishment psychiatry and does (or did) provide a non-pathologising and empowering alternative to deterministic biological models.
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