How Did You Become Anti-psychiatry? Why Should More People Become Anti-psychiatry?

How did you become anti-psychiatry? Why should more people become anti-psychiatry?

am i anti-psychiatry lol? i’m a clinical social worker in the making! maybe my aversion to labels applies here too :)

but in seriousness, the more i learned about the colonizing, white supremacist, misogynistic history of psychiatry, and the more experience i had within it, AND the more i listened to people more marginalized than i about their experiences of institutional psychiatry, the less able i was to hold the ahistorical fantasy view of psychiatry that the field itself and much of recovery and mental health ~awareness~ culture peddle.

psychiatry is embedded, contingent, located squarely in an ignominious history–it’s not a hard science (is hard science even hard science some of my physicist followers are thinking). we are truly making this shit up, even as it relates to research on neurobiological processes, which has lately lent an air of legitimacy to the field. psychiatry privatizes the systemic, and gives the impression that there can only be one framework thru which to understand various emotional and cognitive states and their associated behaviors. it makes state agents the “experts,” gives them the power to label and incarcerate, and construes people who actually have the target experiences as deficient populations to be controlled, rather than the experts on and the rightful interpreters of their own experiences. psychiatry has historically been about correcting deviance from norms, which should set off our foucauldian alarm bells. who decides what is normal? to what purpose?

but i am all for people developing skill to support others and themselves in improving their quality of life, and opening up a fuller, kinder existence! for me, therapy will be a practice of solidarity, of witnessing. i’m sick, you’re sick, the world is sick! there are many ways of knowing thru which to understand this, and many possible personal and political paths to greater freedom and connection. they are for us to determine for ourselves and our communities, not for institutions to dictate.