#antipsychiatry
like i think that psych wards are fundamentally violent because the process of incarceration is fundamentally violent. even if it’s just for a few days, a few weeks, a month–it is still violent to be locked up, deprived of community, and legally unable to say no to what happens to you in there. and in the United States, I think the voluntary/involuntary designations are really useless, because how can there be meaningful consent if you can consent to go in but can’t consent to leave? how can there really be meaningful consent when your options are “you decide to go to the psych ward or we force you to go to the psych ward.” And if you do go in voluntarily, the threat of involuntary commitment is always there and is often weaponized by doctors to get you to do what you want. I cannot count the amount of times me and fellow patients were told that if we didn’t agree to something, they’d just go to court and make us do it anyway.
i see people talking sometimes, about how not all psych wards are bad. when they say that they mean that not all psych wards are abusive, use solitary confinement, physical restraints, drugging without consent, or use strip searchs. But I really think people need to understand that it is not just those horrifically abusive things that make a psych ward violent; the whole fucking practice of incarceration makes a psych ward violent in a very real sense.
“Calling for “more mental health services” starts to look somewhat questionable when one looks at a number of other facts. In the 1970s, WHO conducted a global five-year study in which they found that those diagnosed with schizophrenia —usually considered the most debilitating of all mental disorders— fared better in developing countries than in the U.S. In three of the developing countries in the study —India, Colombia, and Nigeria— only 16% were on antipsychotics, the first line of treatment for schizophrenia cases in the US and Europe. In a repeat of this study, they found the same results, and concluded that living in a developed country was a “strong predictor” that a person would never fully recover. A number of follow-up studies found that patients who had weaned themselves off the antipsychotics, which were said to “fix their brains by correcting an imbalance” had actually fared better than those who continued to take them. When faced with this second set of facts, the idea of mental health treatments being a human rights issue starts to break down.
How do we examine or compare such facts? Do we examine them in relation to all the studies that have been done on psychotropic medication, on hospitalization, and on therapy and simply choose to fund the means with the highest number of “recovered patients” at the end? A number of questions get lost in such an analysis, questions beyond the scope of these studies, questions which perhaps trouble the foundation and presuppositions of the studies themselves. For example: how does one get diagnosed as schizophrenic or bipolar? This isn’t a question about symptoms, but about power. Who does the diagnosing? With what tools? How are these tools legitimated? Against what standard is mental or emotional pathology measured? How did the person getting diagnosed end up in their position? What does it mean to recover from such conditions? And, most importantly in my eyes, what is the concrete experience of the mad person in these relationships?”
—Sasha Durakov, “Beyond Psychiatry and Self-Care: Approaching New Pathways in Mental Health“
If anyone was wondering why I keep making posts criticizing the anti-psychiatry movement for erasing autistic people and being completely ignorant as to how brains work. It’s because I keep seeing posts like this:
“You are not autistic, you have symptoms of autism.” So frustrating in so many ways. I am autistic and I’m tired honestly of both neurotypical and neurodivergent people trying to redefine that out of existence. I don’t know if OP is autistic themself but I honestly don’t care; if they are, they have some serious internalized ableism going on. Autism is not a nebulous collection of “symptoms” that can be changed around or, what this person seems to be implying, fixed.Autism is the condition of my brain from which my autistic traits come from. Same with adhd. They overlap because they are similar but these are real, physical attributes of the brain, which is an physical part of your body, much like the physical parts of your body that produce diabetes or cancer. (This is NOT to compare autism to cancer; just using their words.)
Not every psychological disorder functions the same way. Maybe they’re thinking of depression, or OCD, or personality disorders, which exist as a collection of symptoms that develop throughout life. I was not born with OCD. I wasborn with autism, which my sibling has, and my dad has, and has mountains of evidence pointing towards it being a genetic, heritable condition. Just because doctors can’t diagnose autism with a blood test doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. My G-d.
Don’t know how to tell this person that many physical conditions are diagnosed by… analyzing symptoms and seeing which predefined category you might fit in. Just as an example. Fibromyalgia has no known specific cause and is diagnosed exclusively by analyzing symptoms. Still very much a physical illness. :/
