Normally when I run into my own writing in the wild, I stay out, but I want to defend schmorp here because that is not a fair interpretation of a topic that I feel very strongly about due to deeply personal reasons.
Anti-psychiatry, or mad liberation, or mad pride, or the million other related movements and ideas, are the complete opposite of what you’re saying. They are about the radical acceptance of and complete solidarity with people of all kinds, no matter what, and the rejection of pathologizing them, othering them, and giving them treatments that are often literally torture. Modern psychiatric facilities routinely, to this day, torture patients. They do everything from neglect to electrocution to sleep deprivation to solitary confinement to physical and chemical restraints. These are things that are done with the intention of better outcomes, no doubt, but are also part of a tradition of psychiatric treatment that has been torturing patients supposedly to help them for hundreds of years.
I have personally witnessed this. It changed me forever. I thought that shit was from the past, but it is not. It is here, in the first world, in supposed state-of-the-art medical facilities. If you fall deep enough, if you need help bad enough, as things are now, you will be met with torture. They will lock you in padded rooms with nothing but a bed, a light, 4 cameras watching you, and bloody scratch marks on the wall. They will electrocute you. They’ll take your phone away and limit your family visits to 1 hour every other day, leaving you isolated and your family terrified.
It’s not a conspiracy theory like antivax. It’s a heterodox and critical interpretation of the existing science and its historical context. There are many serious scholars, philosophers, and journalists in this vein, and there have been for a long time, since the concept of medicalized mental illness (as opposed to the previous “mad”) started. Most importantly, there are patients who write about this, or as I’d call them, victims and activists. The mad don’t get to publish in journals about their personal experience being tortured, only the torturers do.
Modern psychiatry is also, with much irony, very unscientific. The “sertanonin imbalance” theory of depression has no evidence, and yet it is still taught to medical practitioners and told to patients. It was only ever a hypothesis to explain why SSRIs work, but further research concluded depressed people’s serotonin levels weren’t meaningfully different. It’s not even the first time we deployed the chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness – early anti-psychotics suppressed dopamine, operating under a similar hypothesis, also now debunked, though the medications are still in use.
If this interests you, I’d suggest Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America for the history, and its sequel, Anatomy of an Epidemic, for a critical look into the modern pharmaceutical psychiatric revolution. Alternatively, you can start with Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist himself, who wrote The Myth of Mental Illness and The Manufacture of Madness 50+ years ago. Just like I wrote in the OP, I want to be very clear: None of these authors belittle mental health struggles. They write, as I do, with a deep caring for those with mental illness, or who are mad, or however we want to categorize it, with a concern that we are doing it wrong. It is a question of how to best classify these struggles and help the people who have them, not whether they’re real or worth caring about.
Here’s the beginning of Anatomy of an Epidemic, which lays out the book’s central thesis:
Over the past 50 years, there has been an astonishing increase in severe mental illness in
the United States . The percentage of Americans disabled by mental illness has increased
fivefold since 1955, when Thorazine-remembered today as psychiatry’s first “wonder”
drug-was introduced into the market . The number of Americans disabled by mental ill-
ness has nearly doubled since 1987, when Prozac-the first in a second generation of
wonder drugs for mental illness-was introduced . There are now nearly 6 million Ameri-
cans disabled by mental illness, and this number increases by more than 400 people each
day . A review of the scientific literature reveals that it is our drug-based paradigm of care
that is fueling this epidemic . The drugs increase the likelihood that a person will become
chronically ill, and induce new and mote severe psychiatric symptoms in a significant
percentage of patients.
Here’s a pdf of the book. Open it up and take a look at how well cited it is. Whitaker is a serious person citing real science but questioning the orthodox interpretation, not an anit-vax crank.
Normally when I run into my own writing in the wild, I stay out, but I want to defend schmorp here because that is not a fair interpretation of a topic that I feel very strongly about due to deeply personal reasons.
Anti-psychiatry, or mad liberation, or mad pride, or the million other related movements and ideas, are the complete opposite of what you’re saying. They are about the radical acceptance of and complete solidarity with people of all kinds, no matter what, and the rejection of pathologizing them, othering them, and giving them treatments that are often literally torture. Modern psychiatric facilities routinely, to this day, torture patients. They do everything from neglect to electrocution to sleep deprivation to solitary confinement to physical and chemical restraints. These are things that are done with the intention of better outcomes, no doubt, but are also part of a tradition of psychiatric treatment that has been torturing patients supposedly to help them for hundreds of years.
I have personally witnessed this. It changed me forever. I thought that shit was from the past, but it is not. It is here, in the first world, in supposed state-of-the-art medical facilities. If you fall deep enough, if you need help bad enough, as things are now, you will be met with torture. They will lock you in padded rooms with nothing but a bed, a light, 4 cameras watching you, and bloody scratch marks on the wall. They will electrocute you. They’ll take your phone away and limit your family visits to 1 hour every other day, leaving you isolated and your family terrified.
It’s not a conspiracy theory like antivax. It’s a heterodox and critical interpretation of the existing science and its historical context. There are many serious scholars, philosophers, and journalists in this vein, and there have been for a long time, since the concept of medicalized mental illness (as opposed to the previous “mad”) started. Most importantly, there are patients who write about this, or as I’d call them, victims and activists. The mad don’t get to publish in journals about their personal experience being tortured, only the torturers do.
Modern psychiatry is also, with much irony, very unscientific. The “sertanonin imbalance” theory of depression has no evidence, and yet it is still taught to medical practitioners and told to patients. It was only ever a hypothesis to explain why SSRIs work, but further research concluded depressed people’s serotonin levels weren’t meaningfully different. It’s not even the first time we deployed the chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness – early anti-psychotics suppressed dopamine, operating under a similar hypothesis, also now debunked, though the medications are still in use.
If this interests you, I’d suggest Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America for the history, and its sequel, Anatomy of an Epidemic, for a critical look into the modern pharmaceutical psychiatric revolution. Alternatively, you can start with Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist himself, who wrote The Myth of Mental Illness and The Manufacture of Madness 50+ years ago. Just like I wrote in the OP, I want to be very clear: None of these authors belittle mental health struggles. They write, as I do, with a deep caring for those with mental illness, or who are mad, or however we want to categorize it, with a concern that we are doing it wrong. It is a question of how to best classify these struggles and help the people who have them, not whether they’re real or worth caring about.
Here’s the beginning of Anatomy of an Epidemic, which lays out the book’s central thesis:
Here’s a pdf of the book. Open it up and take a look at how well cited it is. Whitaker is a serious person citing real science but questioning the orthodox interpretation, not an anit-vax crank.