As I began to work against psychiatry, I was quickly confronted by disinterest, misunderstanding, and refusal to discuss. Psychiatry somehow belongs to a system which is criticised in radical circles. People are stripped of their freedom which could be under certain circumstances totally ungrounded! The existing condition could cause sickness, of course. However what it means to be seen as sick by institutions such as psychiatry in a larger context is rarely talked about. So far, so very superficial.
I started to wonder why other institutions like prisons fall under clear criticism, but psychiatry manages to get around these correlations like giant spruces in the forest. I accepted that the lack of reflection and the sleepy radical movement were responsible. During my work it should however become evident that this problem reaches far more deeply.
The anti-psychiatry movement first came about in the sixties and formed different groupings, unions, and campaigns. Thus came thousands of publications into being; from simple appeals and info pages up to and including complex analyses, which all deal with the conditions and intersectional entanglements of discrimination in psychiatry.
There is then enough material to make one aware of the inhumane, harmful conditions in psychiatry. But still there is this silence.
Still there is this lump in the throat which awkwardly tries to quickly change the topic. Earlier this was no niche area which could somehow be moved in emancipatory practice to another reality. Germany was one of the centres of the pioneers of anti-psychiatry, where theoretical works and sharp analyses of movements were developed, and which in practice tried out new ways of coexistence and drew consequences from this break with civil society – and introduced radical steps.
Refuge sites were founded, houses occupied, and the movement was thought out in larger contexts. Criticism of the psychiatry system belonged courteously in radical circles, whether primarily academically or later practically. So how has this strange impolite and unwelcoming silence come to be?
1. The social aid organisations – It’s what’s best for you
The anti-psychiatry movement must first often create an image which casts a bloody cynical light: psychiatry is regulated by these social health and aid institutions which, though scary and stigmatised, are still social. The moving levels of social power make it difficult to openly criticse abuse, power structures, and human rights crimes.
“They just want to help people!“ is a flimsy argument which ignores the actual suffering, existing mechanisms, and normative templates in broken psychiatry systems.
Psychiatry, disguised as a social health institution, is accordingly depolitisied.
Therefore: only because “health”, “social” and “aid” are printed on paper, there is no need to include them further. The otherwise critical Left appears to not want to take this simple logical step. The innocence of not knowing does not count here. Informing oneself about the circumstances is possible and well accessible, so why is radical psychiatry criticism or a stable solidarity with the anti-psychiatry movement so uncomfortable? What is there one the other side that is so believable?
2. Science can be (in)humane
A further radical step, which is considered in the post-modern times to still be too painful, is the challenge to science. It is simple to put people into boxes if “scientific knowledge” supports it. Burnout, borderline, personality disorder: we do this as if these limited diagnoses have always been there and belonged to the list of symptoms of living. What a person is and how they should be treated is, to put it simply: a construct. Difficult times and confusing stages of life can also be taken seriously and offset without a synthetic disorder.
If we take a look at the struggles of trans activists, we see that the spirit of oppression has bitterly crystallised itself from scientific constructions. The gender dichotomy is equally constructed.
Anti-feminists fumble quickly in their school folders to whip out their biology book from the 8th grade: “See, it’s printed in black and white. There are only two genders blah blah blah.” Defunct and outdated knowledge is uncritically placed against the life realities of thousands of people. That is not only absurd and tiring. The uncriticised droning on of scientific truth monopolies is dangerous.
It is important to think about who shaped norms and dominated science. Diagnostic processes are not disconnected from the rest of the world that we created. They are equally as sexist, racist, and hating of queer people as the rest of society and the people who practise them. What used to or still counts as cray today is therefore connected to the dominant notion of each time. Science, or the naming of sickness or deflection can also be used as a tool of oppression: it seeps through human history that people who are outside of the norm, be them rebellious women, neurodiverse people, homosexuals or trans people, are continually pathologised from top to bottom.
Pathologisation means that perceptions, needs, and behaviours can be defined through prevailing norms as sick. Pathologisation is therefore a really disgusting power instrument which we must once and for all rid from our lives and above all our political praxis.
3. The Construct of the Lunatic– what is in/sanity?
When people in psychiatry are thought about, an intense abstract picture is sketched. The very few cases discussed as people who show strong behavioural diversions. This picture of the completely broken “lunatic” strengthens the argument that it “just has to be”: It is generalised to a person who is nothing more than an idea of a total in/sane* person and who others help out of charity and because of the person’s absolute helplessness.
But it isn’t that easy.
In psychiatry live people who have been diagnosed with burnout, eating disorders, depression, psychotic episodes, and other forms of neurodiversity, are still waiting to be put into a (un)helpful box. Apart from this generalisation, the picture is not criticised.
This gets two further balls rolling: through the degradation of people who do not fit into the norm, people do not identity with them. Although it is a truly horrible praxis, they also fail to show solidarity. A further ball could let solidarity roll away altogether: if being crazy is a different life reality then people cannot imagine how they could come to be in this situation.
Prisons are just a stone’s throw away, we carry the walls in our hearts, we write totally real letters to friends who just two weeks before were planing to get up to no good with us.
Through the abstraction of people in psychiatry this form of identification and solidarity often does not happen. Now psychiatry is, in a similar form, a lot closer to us than we would like it to be.
To end up in psychiatry is actually really easy, especially for people who are underage.
Let’s face it: the world in which we currently live is more than shitty.
It is easy to break under pressure, to then experience hard times and crazy phases. Performance pressures, discrimination, repression: people stop functioning. There are few cool support groups which can treat this suffering. Whether it comes from your parents, the cops who picked you up, or it was your idea first: there you are. Going in is simple, getting out is mostly not.
If you are also still affected by more of the relatively privileged problems, like sexism, ableism, racism, poverty, and hatred of queerness, then your name will be found many times in the lottery for sectioning, just like the fucking Hunger Games of mental health.
People are complex; abstract depictions of in/sanity have to be deconstructed. An in/sane person is not limited to a cliché: they are a person. We deserve the right to be asked what is important to us personally. We deserve the right to be protected from interference. We deserve the right to negotiate on an equal level in terms of self-definition and freedom.
4. Abstraction – More than criminal and crazy
That psychiatry and the system surrounding it allow themselves to be compared with prisons as unmitigated institutions helps to further the anti-prison movement. Criticism of prisons is well-established in the Left; few would speak out in favour of prisons due to the vast solidarity. Even if parallels are recognisable, there is a difference in the conditions and mechanisms in many aspects.
If we concentrate on the commonalities, it becomes clear that the debate is dominated by one question: where to put the supposed in/sane people?
“Ok, but what do we do with them?!” is also a question which activists in the anti-prisons movement constantly face. Alongside examples of practised transformative justice, the anti-prisons movement precisely criticises depictions of criminal people, who are per se painted as evil and violent. Critics then pick up their paint brushes: the penial system systematically punishes marginalised and often also economic victims of capitalism and wants to place them under control. Under this light punishment has nothing more to do with evil.
The criminal subject, or abstract evil, must be following this logic discarded. If this question were to be posed in the anti-psychiatry debate then the room would get super quiet. In/sanity is also an abstract and constructed term. Only this is still to many too believable in the connection to a supposed social health apparatus, which is just meant to help. The abstraction, which makes it acceptable to stripe people of their freedom, is simply not further reflected on.
In/sane people become dehumanised; they remain in/sane in this idea.
The anti-psychiatry movement therefore needs to some extent continue to criticse this single compulsory institution. We need to understand which societal norms devalue other life styles and realities, and why this then with the help of Pathologisation is suppressed. What counts as in/sane and therefore sick is a societal idea. This thinking is anchored in us because we are all a part of it. Deviations can and must be endured. Solidarity cannot stop at norms, it must be completely practised with oppressed and stigmatised people. If it does not go further, it becomes a blunt weapon for freedom and human rights.
Solidarity must be (practical)
Many psychiatry survivors describe their experiences as dehumanising. The founder of the anti-psychiatry movement had already decided that in psychiatry people were not longer considered to be people but rather were degraded to objects. Our rights and freedoms are compromised; we have to endure molestations on a daily basis; we get drugs with various side effects which are not once discussed with us. And actually the biggest contradiction: it often does not help us. Therapy does not take place, or they are so normative that it borders for many on violence –
what remains are the bars on the windows to protect society from us.
But who protects us from society? Who protects us from their violent norms? Who protects us from the capitalist pressure to succeed and discrimination? If free human rights only exist as shadows, it happens in psychiatry without a filter.
Why does the majority of society run away and why must we beg for radical solidarity also in leftist contexts? The question that numbs our tongues: are we not human to you?
Resist normality- show some solidarity
Arguments for psychiatry are finite.
We always though so and therefore other perspectives can only be wrong? Look more closely who this ‘we’ is. Science must be critically questioned in emancipatory practice.
Psychiatry just wants to help? Ask yourselves under which circumstances and conditions help should come, and whether real help even takes place. Psychiatry is not a humanitarian aid organisation which altruistically wants to rescue people.
Where should the dangerous in/sane people go? Right now, one of them is talking to you.
Completely free, completely tame.
The only dangerous thing about me is my broken heart which has let rage rise up in the hope of gaining more solidarity. Norms need to be done away with; our in/sanity is defined by others.
Listen to us when to speak of the violence we have experienced in psychiatry. Finally start discussing support groups in solidarity to protect each other simultaneously from state intervention. Give our struggles space and attention.
The next time I scream “burn down the prisons”, I want you to shout just as loudly “and psychiatry too.”
*The slash in the word in/sane stands for the fact that behind this relationship there are often applied constructions according to descriminatory societal control and dscipline mechanisms.
