#psychiatric hegemony

[beguines]

As a significant "feminised" category of mental illness, however, HPD [histrionic personality disorder] was superseded in the DSM-III by the introduction of the controversial BPD, a label which has been increasingly applied to women, with around 75 per cent of all cases estimated to be female. Seen as a milder form of schizophrenia and lying on the "borderline" between neuroses and psychoses, the concept has been used in psychiatry since 1938. Like other personality disorders, BPD has a notoriously low reliability level even by the generally poor standards of the DSM, and even within the profession is considered by many as yet another "wastebasket" category (though as Bourne ruefully remarks, the ambiguity of such personality disorders makes them particularly useful in policing deviance in the new century). One member of the DSM-III task force stated at the time of constructing BPD that "in my opinion, the borderline syndrome stands for everything that is wrong with psychiatry [and] the category should be eliminated". The chair of the task force, Robert Spitzer, admitted with the publication of DSM-III that BPD was only included in the manual due to pressures from psychoanalytically oriented clinicians who found it useful in their practices. Such practices have been documented by Luhrmann who describes psychiatrists' typical view of the BPD patient as "an angry, difficult woman—almost always a woman—given to intense, unstable relationships and a tendency to make suicide attempts as a call for help.' Bearing significant similarities to the feelings of nineteenth century psychiatrists towards hysterics, Luhrmann's study reveals psychiatrists' revulsion of those they label with a personality disorder: they are "patients you don't like, don't trust, don't want . . . One of the reasons you dislike them is an expungable sense that they are morally at fault because they choose to be different." Becker reinforces this general view of the BPD label when she states that "[t]here is no other diagnosis currently in use that has the intense pejorative connotations that have been attached to the borderline personality disorder diagnosis." A bitter irony for those labelled with BPD is that many are known to have experienced sexual abuse in childhood, something they share in common with many of those Freud labelled as hysterical a century earlier; a psychiatric pattern of depoliticising sexual abuse by ignoring the (usually) male perpetrator, and instead pathologising the survival mechanisms of the victim as abnormal.

By the mid-1980s, the hysteria diagnosis had disappeared from the clinical setting while BPD had become the most commonly diagnosed personality disorder. BPD is now the most important label which psychiatric hegemony invokes to serve capital and patriarchy through monitoring and controlling the modern woman, reinforcing expected gender roles within the more fluid, neoliberal environment. Nevertheless, as Jimenez (emphasis added) reminds us, the historical continuity from hysteria to BPD is clear: "Both diagnoses delimit appropriate behavior for women, and many of the criteria are stereotypically feminine. What distinguishes borderline personality disorder from hysteria is the inclusion of anger and other aggressive characteristics, such as shoplifting, reckless driving, and substance abuse. If the hysteric was a damaged woman, the borderline woman is a dangerous one."

Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

#bruce m.z. cohen #psychiatric hegemony #psychiatry

[drdemonprince]

I recently read "Unmasking Autism" and it felt like coming home. (I have been misdiagnosed my whole life.) I was so excited to find community and start meeting other people like me. But now I feel alienated--I feel like online Autism is basically a leftist political identity. It's fair to assume we all care about disability justice, but we don't all have the same beliefs about Israel and Palestine, for example, nor should we have to. Is there Autistic community that is not explicitly political?

You better reread Unmasking Autism because you missed a fuckin lot if you think embracing your disability is not an explicitly political project. Maybe focus on the sections about the American police shooting Black Autistic men, and Israeli military members slaughtering Palestinian Autistic people.

#oh you feel alienated because most Autistic people give a shit about stopping a genocide? boo fuckin hoo #i HOPE it's fuckin lonely in the center!!!! it is a soulless place!!!! #but you can get yourself out of it at any moment anon. read Psychiatric Hegemony and Mad World and Empire of Normality #then try some Dawn of Everything and Debt: the First 5000 Years

[endofthischain]

"are you failing within neoliberal society? then you might have a mental illness"

#again from psychiatric hegemony by Bruce mz cohen

[xxlovelynovaxx]

Thinking about ableism

Thinking about how ambulatory wheelchair users get accused of being fakers and people are surprised when we can walk

and yet non-ambulatory wheelchair users also face "can't you just walk a few steps?? well, why not?!?"

It's a perfect example of how there is no group of disabled that doesn't experience ableism.

Invisible or visible, physical or psychiatric, fluctuating symptoms or consistent, late diagnosed or early, disabled from birth or later in life, high or low support needs... we all face ableism. The amount and type can vary, but with ableism so baked into the very foundation of our society, we all face SIGNIFICANT ableism.

Remember, the real enemy is abled hegemony.

#eyestrain

[familyabolisher]

Would you elaborate on why you don't really believe in addictive personalities? I find that a useful descriptor for myself that reminds me how easy it is for me to get into unhealthy behavior patterns. I have to fully stay away from tiktok and gacha games(I will never go gambling) because I know I can't trust myself with them. I also have to be REALLY careful with alcohol, etc. I have adhd and bi-polar, and I like having a phrase that describes my experience without being too over-medicalized and relating everything to diagnoses. I'm curious why you don't like it as a construct/whatever your opinion is!

personal explanatory power is one thing and i wouldn’t begrudge you that but i don’t really see how it has any materialist usage; and ultimately, like, i’m a marxist, any way in which i evaluate a framework that’s supposed to explain something in the world has to come from the assumption that the world is best explained through historical materialism. ‘addictive personality’ with no further elaboration is an idealist claim which obfuscates crucial points of discourse around addiction and the conditions that give rise to it—and indeed the conditions which cause us to name one substance or action as ‘addictive’ over another in the first place. addiction is materially punished; through social stigma, but also through housing discrimination, workplace discrimination, policing & incarceration, psychiatry, the sorts of forces that add up to eventually facilitate the conditions of social murder. we only have to look as far as the war on drugs to understand how ‘addiction,’ the consumption and circulation of substances regarded as ‘addictive,’ is not a prediscursive state but one that can be leveraged to violently enforce conditions of hegemony and quell insurgence through carceralism and social murder. i also just heavily distrust psychology as a field and certainly don’t buy these appeals to an essential self as a self who ‘has’ xyz tendencies as though xyz tendencies (such as the traits given in the five-factor model which is applied to ‘explain’ a predisposition to addiction) are anything other than postdiscursive descriptors we’ve imbued with meaning relative to a postdiscursive normalcy. i think psychological theorising around personality tends to obfuscate materialist frameworks in favour of methodologies which presume and reify normativity (eg. the claim that those more vulnerable to ‘addictive personalities’ have a stronger tendency towards ‘social alienation’ and ‘nonconformity’ without defining what constitutes ‘alienation’ and ‘conformity’ in the first place—as though personality traits simply appear out of thin air).

as we’ve seen dozens of times, “addiction” is a slippery term easily wielded towards reactionary ends. “porn addiction” is a line taken by anti-sex work radfems; “food addiction” is infamously unscientific and preying on cultural predispositions towards fatphobia; “internet addiction” is similarly flimsy and frequently deployed in theories of cultural degeneration. this doesn’t mean that the clusters of behaviours we term “addiction” aren’t “real” in the sense that some people do develop dependencies on particular substances, but that the term can be used to draw connections between the reactionary attitude held towards addiction & its attendant connotations (of infantilisation, justified removal of autonomy, incarceration, psychiatric intervention, and so on) and whatever the wielder wants to malign (porn, food, using the internet). if we reify the idea of there being an ontological state within ourselves by which we are more or less prone to “addiction,” we by implication act against the necessity of interrogating what is meant by “addiction” and why it is being invoked in the first place; we also place all our explanatory eggs, so to speak, in the basket of the individual cast as “addicted,” rather than turning our attention towards the source of the “addictive” substance or object and its material origins + usage.

so it bears asking what we’re obscuring and what we’re facilitating when we give legitimacy to the idea of an ‘addictive personality’ in the public discourse, which is what i meant when i said that the term has no materialist explanatory power for me—casting someone in the role of an addict, even if only in the hypothetical, allows others to enforce the stigmas that such a role entails, through, for example, infantilisation, denial of autonomy, and reluctance to treat the individual’s behaviour as worthy of respect, compassion, and mature response. it creates a telos out of addiction under conditions wherein addiction means incarceration (literal or psychiatric), discrimination, ostracisation, everything i just laid out in the first paragraph. it makes addiction into a fundamentally individualist discourse which must therefore have individualist solutions, rather than a complex nexus of social conditions and discourses that we can describe and then fight against.

#ask

[transmutationisms]

i think you do a really impressive job balancing comprehensive/concise while referencing a lot of complex frameworks(contexts? schools of thought? lol idk what to call that. big brain ideas) but if you have any readings specifically on the institution of psychiatry topic that you would recommend/think are relevant, I'd be interested. it's absolutely not a conversation that's being had enough and I want to be able to articulate myself around it

yes i have readings >:)

first of all, the anti-psychiatry bibliography and resource guide is a great place to start getting oriented in this literature. it's split by sub-topic, and there are paragraphs interspersed throughout that give summaries of major thinkers' positions and short intros to key texts.

it's from 1979, though, so here are some recs from the last 4 decades:

overview critiques

mind fixers: psychiatry's troubled search for the biology of mental illness, by anne harrington

psychiatric hegemony: a marxist theory of mental illness, by bruce m z cohen

desperate remedies: psychiatry's turbulent quest to cure mental illness, by andrew scull

psychiatry and its discontents, by andrew scull

madness is civilization: when the diagnosis was social, 1948–1980, by michael e staub

contesting psychiatry: social movements in mental health, by nick crossley

the dsm & pharmacy

dsm: a history of psychiatry's bible, by allan v horwitz

the dsm-5 in perspective: philosophical reflections on the psychiatric babel, by steeves demazeux & patrick singy

pharmageddon, by david healy

pillaged: psychiatric medications and suicide risk, by ronald w maris

the making of dsm-iii: a diagnostic manual's conquest of american psychiatry, by hannah s decker

the myth of the chemical cure: a critique of psychiatric drug treatment, by joanna moncrieff

the book of woe: the dsm and the unmaking of psychiatry, by gary greenberg

prozac on the couch: prescribing gender in the era of wonder drugs, by jonathan metzl

the creation of psychopharmacology, by david healy

the bitterest pills: the troubling story of antipsychotic drugs, by joanna moncrieff

psychiatry & race

the protest psychosis: how schizophrenia became a black disease, by jonathan metzl

administrations of lunacy: racism and the haunting of american psychiatry at the milledgeville asylum, by mab segrest

the peculiar institution and the making of modern psychiatry, 1840–1880, by wendy gonaver

what's wrong with the poor? psychiatry, race, and the war on poverty, by mical raz

national and cross-national contexts

mad by the millions: mental disorders and the early years of the world health organization, by harry yi-jui wu

psychiatry and empire, by sloan mahone & megan vaughan

ʿaṣfūriyyeh: a history of madness, modernity, and war in the middle east, by joelle m abi-rached

surfacing up: psychiatry and social order in colonial zimbabwe, 1908–1968, by lynette jackson

the british anti-psychiatrists: from institutional psychiatry to the counter-culture, 1960–1971, by oisín wall

crime, madness, and politics in modern france: the medical concept of national decline, by robert a nye

reasoning against madness: psychiatry and the state in rio de janeiro, 1830–1944, by manuella meyer

colonial madness: psychiatry in french north africa, by richard keller

madhouse: psychiatry and politics in cuban history, by jennifer lynn lambe

depression in japan: psychiatric cures for a society in distress, by junko kitanaka

inheriting madness: professionalization and psychiatric knowledge in 19th century france, by ian r dowbiggin

mad in america: bad science, bad medicine, and the enduring mistreatment of the mentally ill, by robert whitaker

#sorry this is SO MANY things lmao #i wld recommend starting with harrington or scull as an intro and then maybe look at one of the more topic-specific texts #depending on what interests you specifically #book recs #psychiatry

[serialunaliver]

does anyone have a pdf of Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

[librarycards]

hi sorry i saw u rb posts on veganism & i was wondering how you reconcile that stuff re: ED's (for context i am vegetarian -which ik isn't the same thing- for eco/ethical reasons but also have loved ones with eating problems that i never never never want to shame for eating ever)

this is a good question! I've addressed it a few times before on here, but in brief: veganism is a philosophy and ethical orientation around all forms of consumption and relationality. food is, for a number of reasons (many of which also contribute to the prevalence of eds - fixations on false ideas of 'perfectable' heath; desirability politics; etc) a hypervisible component of vegan life. this is particularly true given that there is a massive imbalance in the ways that we collectively gather. a focus on food-themed events marginalizes a wide variety of disabled people and/or people with religious/ethical food restrictions, and in this case, being vegan and living with an ed are actually pretty similar re: exclusion and frustration.

given the above, more and more people these days have been delineating between "vegan" and "plant based". to be vegan, here, is to have a certain set of political commitments - toward multispecies + climate justice, via critical analysis and collective organizing regarding what we are, literally and figuratively, expected to swallow under settler colonial capitalist hegemony. to be, or eat, a plant-based diet, is no more than what it says on the tin.

with that important distinction aside, i actually want to focus on one part of your ask: the idea that to be vegan is in and of itself an act of shaming. i want you (and not specifically you, because this is something a lot of people should ask themselves) to think about why you find veganism itself to shame (verb) nonvegans. generally, there are a few reasons for this: perhaps it's just not having met a lot of vegans and only hearing internet scaremongering. perhaps it's a discomfort not unlike other unwillingness to look at the horrible shit that makes "our" lifestyles possible. it is hard to understand our own complicity in hegemonic violence, and, vegan or not, it is impossible to extricate ourselves fully from it. but we do need to look. veganism, at its best, provides a critical lens for looking, and a set of practices to minimize, as best we can, our buy-in.

truthfully, i think that people who feel shamed by the existence of a vegan in their midst should figure that problem out on their own. this includes psychiatrically disabled people, incl. disorderly eaters. this does not give any of us license to harangue vulnerable people for their eating habits, but it also doesn't morally obligate us to change our lifestyles for their comfort!

as a vegetarian, you probably don't have a whole lot of occasion to talk about your vegetarianism (outside, say, drs offices or food-based gatherings). people are often surprised when they learn that i'm vegan, because they assume all vegans must be "preachy" (i have yet to meet a vegan over the age of eighteen irl who is like this. i've met a lot of Big Mad protein bros, though, as well as MYRIAD preachy med professionals and laypeople who freak tf out that i'm a principled vegan anorexic). at the end of the day, you need to be able to live a life you can tolerate, one that best facilitates you to impart good in the world + in your relationships. one that allows you to understand the gravity and importance of your own survival, on your terms. if vegetarianism or veganism do that for you, those who love you will support it, even if it takes a while.

so, yeah. i'm not sure if you wanted explanation, advice, or both, so I gave both. sorry for the long answer (even though i promised brevity...) but i believe very strongly in bodily autonomy - this informs my veganism - anarchism - broad politic, and my answer to this ask. so you got an essay!!

#disorderly eating #mine #ed m #i'm trying desperately to retag relevant stuff as #disorderly eating to make it easier to find but it will probably be a wip for a while #vegan #autonomy

[chronicbitchsyndrome]

i rlly fucking loathe the conflation of verbality with support needs i see in the autism blogosphere sometimes...

like the idea that hyperverbality=fluid communication=low(er) support needs, generally speaking

hyperverbality isn't even necessarily a form of fluid communication to begin with, for one thing, and it can absolutely be an intensely disabling barrier to access to neurotypical hegemony

people constantly forget that autism and schizophrenia have been referred to as "cousin disorders" even within the psychiatric institution for actual decades; the presentation of a high-support-needs hyperverbal autistic has so much overlap with the presentation of various psychosis-based mental health labels

hyperverbality for me can manifest as word salad, as stream of consciousness that is not only unintelligible to a neurotypical-hegemony-socialized frame of reference, but is even actively dangerous and is completely involuntary

(me masking is when i manage to stop talking, not when i force myself to talk. if i can't mask, then i can't stop talking.* i have extremely limited masking capabilities and this leads to me being basically incapable of participating in any hegemonic structures. i can't work. i was cyberschooled. i'm mostly housebound.)

hyperverbal autistics :handshake: with schizophrenics on being criminalized for our communication, being forcibly medicated and institutionalized because of it, being incapable of accessing institutions like work or school because we are incapable of communicating to the normative people around us

and it's more common for hyperverbality to coexist with other forms of high support needs than the common impression seems to be. there's this image of a lsn autistic with a specific needs profile, and a hsn autistic with a specific needs profile, and any experience outside of those categories gets discarded (and fuck mid-support-needs as a concept ig) and people get armchair-diagnosed as one or the other, meanwhile im incapable of living independently and can't work or complete school but get nonconsensually labeled as "lsn" by autistic bloggers because i type like this and i talk a lot. get told that makes me "able to communicate" to nt hegemonic standards when i genuinely cannot and i have been violently targeted and criminalized for how i communicate and even if i hadn't that still wouldn't erase my other support needs.

*also have nonverbal episodes where i can't force myself to speak, the two aren't mutually exclusive

#actuallyautistic #madpunk #antipsych #anti psychiatry

[beguines]

Yet problems in the legitimacy of psychiatry's vocation have remained, and reached crisis point at the cusp of deinstitutionalisation in the 1970s. At the time, a number of significant studies demonstrated the profession's inherent tendency to label people as "mentally ill," to stigmatise everyday aspects of a person’s behaviour as signs of pathology, and to make judgements on a person's mental health status based on subjective judgements rather than objective criteria.

The study that had the most direct impact on the psychiatric profession—as well as public consciousness—at this time was David Rosenhan's (1973) classic research On Being Sane in Insane Places which found that psychiatrists could not distinguish between "real" and "pseudo" patients presenting at psychiatric hospitals in the United States. All of Rosenhan's "pseudo" patients (college students/researchers involved in the experiment) were admitted and given a psychotic label, and all the subsequent behaviour of the researchers—including their note-taking—was labelled by staff as further symptoms of their disorder. This research was a culmination of earlier studies on labelling and mental illness which had begun in the 1960s with Irving Goffman (1961) and Thomas Scheff (1966). Goffman's ethnographic study of psychiatric incarceration demonstrated many of the features which Rosenhan's study would later succinctly outline, including the arbitrary nature of psychiatric assessment, the labelling of patient behaviour as further evidence of "mental illness," and the processes of institutional conformity by which the inmates learned to accept such labels if they wanted to have any chance of being released from the institution at a later date. Scheff's work on diagnostic decision making in psychiatry formulated a general labelling theory for the sociology of mental health. Again, his research found that psychiatrists made arbitrary and subjective decisions on those designated as "mentally ill," sometimes retaining people in institutions even when there was no evidence to support such a decision. Psychiatrists, he argued, relied on a common sense set of beliefs and practices rather than observable, scientific evidence. Scheff concluded that the labelling of a person with a "mental illness" was contingent on the violation of social norms by low-status rule-breakers who are judged by higher status agents of social control (in this case, the psychiatric profession). Thus, according to these studies, the nature of "mental illness" is not a fixed object of medical study but rather a form of "social deviance"—a moral marker of societal infraction by the powerful inflicted on the powerless. This situation is summated in Becker's general theory of social deviance which stated that "deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an 'offender.' The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label".

Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

#bruce m.z. cohen #psychiatric hegemony #psychiatry

[campgender]

Please say more about being anti psychiatry? Is it about the white hegemony of therapists or what

ngl i scrolled for a bit trying to figure out if something i posted here prompted this bc usually my antipsych posts go on my disability sideblog (& here’s a link to my tag for that!) & i have concluded it’s either in response to my carrd or a ted lasso post i made a few days ago lol. either way i’m glad you’re here! i’ll try to give a rundown that isn’t entirely repetitive of other posts & reblogs linked above.

i don’t think it’s particularly helpful or accurate to say what a certain movement or political position is/isn’t because there are, in fact, many anti-psychiatries, all with their own perspectives about various points of tension, but i think these are the closest to general tenets:

anti-psychiatry = working toward the full dismantling of the system of psychiatry & its consequence of psychiatrization. recognizing psychiatry as a normalizing force & an oppressive institution. that work can be internal – “killing the psychiatrist in your head” – or more explicit activism.

full radical bodily autonomy for all. (this is often interrelated with harm reduction, as pertaining to drugs – prescribed & not – as well as self-injury, etc.) as also follows: the immediate & permanent end of forced institutionalization & forced medication, & the provision of thorough informed consent for all interventions.

destigmatization of mental illness, psychiatrized disabilities, Madness, & whatever else you’d like to call it; the right to be Mad.

material resources dedicated to supporting Mad people to live the lives we want.

so i would articulate anti-psychiatry as being less about the whiteness of therapists & more about therapy’s role in upholding whiteness, in a manner that can be simplified as two threads of the same rope, entwined & re-entwining:

psychiatric diagnosis as racialized violence. particularly “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD, but also pretty much any “disorder,” especially “personality disorders” & diagnoses related to paranoia (as the adage goes, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you) medicalizes & thereby stigmatizes the state of being Black. entire schools of therapeutic thought (looking at you, CBT) are dedicated to convincing people they are not being targeted for unfair treatment by the people around them. it’s a one-two punch: we’ve invented a system that makes you Black & oppresses you on that basis, and then we punish you for recognizing it. these tools are then leveraged against other marginalized groups as the system sees fit.

ableism against those who “really are crazy.” theorists have dedicated their lives to explaining this better than me, but while there are forms of ableism that predate capitalism & modern concepts of race, in the present day ableism is a punishment for a real or perceived failure to uphold & reproduce racial capitalism. you aren’t productive; you aren’t making the imperialist state more money; you aren’t creating & then raising white babies in a nuclear family who will then produce more profit & more white babies, & so on.

a particular concern in the past few years is the increasing shift from policing by cops to policing by social workers and/or “trained mental health professionals”; the relative harms of prisons versus psychiatric hospitals can be debated, but ultimately both are forms of institutionalization which deny people autonomy & access to community, as well as often have long-term negative effects on things like employment (& therefore housing), parental custody, voting, etc.

i hope this answered your question! feel free to send a follow-up if you would like. in addition to my disability blog i recommend checking out @librarycards @bioethicists @bananapeppers @psychiatricsurvivorpositivity

#asks #anti psychiatry #ok to reblog <3

[drdemonprince]

What do you mean when you talk about anti-psychiatry? Because on the surface that sounds like not getting treatment or not learning how to manage psychological disorders, and that seems like a VERY bad idea.

It's anti-psychiatry as an oppressive network of control. I don't know why people always assume that critiquing a power structure means you're saying individual people shouldn't do what they need and want to do to manage their wellbeing within said structure but those things are not the same. I'm an anarchist. I'm for disabled liberation. i'm literally never going to claim to know what an individual person should do.

If you support neurodiversity as a concept, you already support anti-psychiatry! It is literally an anti-psychiatry perspective. So is supporting self-diagnosis. Or informed consent approaches to drugs or to trans identity. Getting homosexuality removed from the DSM is an anti-psychiatry move. So is opposing forced institutionalization. So is opposing conservatorships.

The radical mental health subreddit is a great read on this. As is Nobody's Normal by Roy Grinker, Psychiatric Hegemony by Bruce Cohen, all of Jesse Meadow's writing at sluggish.substack.com, and also... all of my work.

[illnessfaker]

i've said this before but idc if you're someone who's both physically and mentally disabled/ill - if your reasoning for the division between the two being arbitrary is "the brain is an organ" you're a shill for psychiatric hegemony and overall not doing mentally disabled/ill people any favors in terms of liberation. mental conditions don't need to be framed as "brain disorders" or brain dysfunction to be legitimate and having that understanding of mental conditions is massively reductionist and misunderstands how psychiatry, abnormal psychology, and the diagnostic process even function.

#op #ableism #sanism #site culture

[queen-mabs-revenge]

having increasing amounts of conversations with nd comrades about the concept of mental health and mental illness under capitalism, so i went looking for texts on a marxist approach to mental health.

currently a bit into 'psychiatric hegemony' by bruce cohen, and oh man oh man oh man

WOOF.

#absolutely fascinating so far #description in alt text #the argument that - like police - psychology was invented as a direct tool of ruling class oppression and therefore cannot be reformed #and has no place in a socialist future is #whew i'm definitely fascinated and ready to hear his arguments

[transmutationisms]

Long time listener first time caller (well not really I'm pretty sure we've talked about Succession before). I wanna read up more on anti psychiatry but I'm fucking shithouse at reading, are there any like videos or podcasts or audiobooks you'd recommend, because that would make my life ten times easier

yes great question honestly. i haven't heard all of these podcast episodes, but i curated the list based on knowing the speakers' work (not necessarily the podcast hosts/shows!), and i think these are good places to start.

"Debunking the Myth of the Chemical Imbalance with Dr. Joanna Moncrieff" interviewed by Dr. Caroline Leaf

Revolution Health Radio: "Reviewing the Evidence on the Serotonin Theory of Depression, with Dr. Joanna Moncrieff"

Mad in America Radio: Lucy Johnstone on the Power Threat Meaning Framework

NPR Fresh Air: Anne Harrington on psychiatry's "troubled search" for a biological understanding of mental illness

New Books Network: Mical Raz on her book "What's Wrong With the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty"

The Mental Breakdown Morning Show: "Bruce Cohen and Psychiatric Hegemony" (Cohen, unlike most on this list, explicitly aims for a marxist explanation and understanding of mental illness)

Madness Radio: "Bipolar Medication Myths" (Joanna Moncrieff interviewed by Will Hall)

What Your GP Doesn't Tell You: "David Healy Discusses SSRI Drugs, Suicide and Sexual Dysfunction"

Coming From Left Field: "The Political Economy of Mental Health Systems with Joanna Moncrieff"

States of Mind: "Mental Illness in America" (includes segments with Katherine Bankole-Medina, Jonathan Metzl, Allan Horwitz, Jamie Cohen-Cole, and Elyn Saks)

Jesse Meadows's podcast on ADHD, "Sluggish" (haven't listened to this one, but have read a lot of their writing; they're challenging the psychiatric view of ADHD as a person who struggles with the symptoms and behaviours the diagnostic label describes)

audio books: i'm honestly not sure where's the best and cheapest place to actually download these from, but i know there are audio books of 'mind fixers' by anne harrington (narrated by joyce bean) and 'desperate remedies' by andrew scull (narrated by jonathan keeble). uh, if anyone has a good list of audiobooks on this lmk :-)

#psychiatry

[anarchistin]

We explore the history of psychology and psychiatric coercion, the violence and carceral logic implicit in locking away the "insane."

We discuss the ways in which neurotypicality is constructed to serve the hegemony of the ruling class.

#mad liberation #anarchism #psychiatry #neurotypical #neurodiversity #podcast #capitalism #Spotify