I’m generally anti-psychiatry. Diagnosis not really based in hard science, and often used to subdue whose voice we don’t want to hear. There’s better ways of maintaining and regaining one’s mental health, I believe.
It’s strange that the average leftie can be anti-establishment, anti-police, anti-capitalism, anti-machismo … but mention anti-psychiatry to them and get downvoted to hell. Never made much sense to me.
It’s strange that the average leftie can be anti-establishment, anti-police, anti-capitalism, anti-machismo … but mention anti-psychiatry to them and get downvoted to hell. Never made much sense to me.
Respectfully, it’s because I believe that you’re making a category error. Establishment, police, capitalism, and machismo are hierarchies. In my view, psychiatry is a tool, which is often used as a tool of oppression, but which can and often is similarly used as a tool of liberation. Psychiatry is not, in my view, a hierarchy itself.
How is psychiatry not a hierarchy? You feel unwell, but instead of taking the time you need to figure out why you feel so, you go to a professional, they diagnose you with a disorder. It’s usually a made up thing like ‘Can’t-pay-attention-disorder’ or ‘Doesn’t-obey-authority-disorder’ or ‘Is-really-sad-syndrome’ - just more fancy sounding to fool the people who desperately want to believe that this shit is science. Then they medicate you with one of their experimental substances and try to make you functional for work, war or procreation again.
Mind you - I’m not against self-reflection and maintaining a language to speak with others about feelings, emotions, relations. I’m all for supporting one another through times of intense emotions. But I won’t give away the authority over my inner world of feeling to a professional working by the logic of a capitalist state I otherwise reject and let my unwellness about the rotten state of the world be dismissed as a disorder that is just happening in my own head.
You feel unwell, but instead of taking the time you need to figure out why you feel so, you go to a professional
Actually, I was referred to a few other lines of therapy and coping before psychiatry, none of which helped me. And I am absolutely not discouraged from figuring out why on my own. Psychiatry helped me focus on the why under my own power. Even though that wasn’t facilitated by the psychiatrist, I did take the time (and still do) to figure out why I feel this way. The medications are a tool to help me do that.
It’s usually a made up thing like ‘Can’t-pay-attention-disorder’ or ‘Doesn’t-obey-authority-disorder’ or ‘Is-really-sad-syndrome’ - just more fancy sounding to fool the people who desperately want to believe that this shit is science.
Right, but I absolutely do have the “is really sad syndrome”. Like I would be stuck in bed all day doing nothing and watching the world go by without meds, like I was before I started taking them. Even if we lifted the burden of capitalism, my brain has developed around that reality. I need chemical help to do stuff. It would have been nice to not have grown up in a world like that, but the damage is done, and I have to cope.
Then they medicate you with one of their experimental substances and try to make you functional for work, war or procreation again.
These substances are no more experimental than recreational drugs. Frankly, they are extremely well studied for the most part. And we do need to improve the scientific rigor behind psychiatry, absolutely, 100% with you. But that doesn’t mean that in the interim, we can’t do liberatory work with the nascent tools that psychiatry offers us.
But I won’t give away the authority over my inner world of feeling to a professional working by the logic of a capitalist state I otherwise reject and let my unwellness about the rotten state of the world be dismissed as a disorder that is just happening in my own head.
professional working by the logic of a capitalist state
So is the authority of the bootmaker invalid if they are working by the logic of the capitalist state? Because to some extent yes, it does temper the authority I delegate to my psychiatrist! But that doesn’t mean that their expertise is completely unusable. E.g. medical professionals in other fields also operate under the logic of a capitalist state to various extents.
I’ve had ‘really-sad’ for years and still have. I was glad at first to have found a word for it, and to have found the chemical imbalance theory (yes it was a theory, in the meantime debunked). It took a few decades to understand that the psychiatry narrative of my ‘really-sad’ is close to an accurate description, but hides the real causes of it. Psychiatry never mentions the failures in our societies as causes of the unwellness but treats the unwellness as individual failure, and that’s not an innocent error to make.
Psychiatry never mentions the failures in our societies as causes of the unwellness but treats the unwellness as individual failure, and that’s not an innocent error to make.
I completely agree. But for me, this does not make psychiatry a hierarchy. It makes psychiatry a framework tainted by the logic of capitalism. And if it’s too tainted for you to trust, I completely sympathize. But I do still believe that, despite its foundational flaws, it is still capable of being liberatory, even in its nascent stage as a science.
Really, I wanted to respectfully push back on the notion that leftists who use or support the use of psychiatry have failed to consider the abuses that psychiatry has committed upon us. I have. And I’m living the consequences of my analysis.
With respect and personal experience, like any other tool, it can create and destroy. You may not be responsible for your troubles, you are responsible for healing them.
You’re against psychiatry being abused. Psychiatry is simply the process of providing (broadly) medical help to people with mental problems. People doing it wrong does not mean it as a concept needs to be abandoned.
Eeeeh … okay, but one has to pick apart ‘Psychiatry’ so much that not much will be left of it in the end. Look at its history, look at the science. The useful part you end up with is more often than not therapy, which again ends up more often than not being common sense advice you would give your best friend. And what most psychiatric diagnosis really boils down to is that when you subject people to stressful living conditions like poverty, war, displacement, authoritarianism etc. they develop mental problems.
And medication? Yes, some of it somewhat sometimes works, but in its current state it’s such a crude game of trial and error that I’d rather stay away, I feel actually safer self-medicating with plants and mushrooms.
you are far too generous to describe the big-pharma frenzy of overmedicalisation as simple ‘trial and error’. Maybe a clinician trying to use their tools to hit a moving target requires using trial and error, but the manufacturing of physically addictive drugs which only work to mask symptoms is anything but an accident
Your faith in “common sense” is commendable but I wouldn’t want to subject anyone but a trained professional to the stress of having to listen to me whine about my issues and then also having to dissect them to help me find the underlying issues.
If you give your common sense a little credit and learn to trust your gut your might find it all quite competent - if not even wise. I’d say it took a few years of adjustment to get from being authority-oriented to self-stable, but I wouldn’t want to change back.
I’m generally anti-psychiatry. Diagnosis not really based in hard science, and often used to subdue whose voice we don’t want to hear. There’s better ways of maintaining and regaining one’s mental health, I believe.
It’s strange that the average leftie can be anti-establishment, anti-police, anti-capitalism, anti-machismo … but mention anti-psychiatry to them and get downvoted to hell. Never made much sense to me.
Respectfully, it’s because I believe that you’re making a category error. Establishment, police, capitalism, and machismo are hierarchies. In my view, psychiatry is a tool, which is often used as a tool of oppression, but which can and often is similarly used as a tool of liberation. Psychiatry is not, in my view, a hierarchy itself.
How is psychiatry not a hierarchy? You feel unwell, but instead of taking the time you need to figure out why you feel so, you go to a professional, they diagnose you with a disorder. It’s usually a made up thing like ‘Can’t-pay-attention-disorder’ or ‘Doesn’t-obey-authority-disorder’ or ‘Is-really-sad-syndrome’ - just more fancy sounding to fool the people who desperately want to believe that this shit is science. Then they medicate you with one of their experimental substances and try to make you functional for work, war or procreation again.
Mind you - I’m not against self-reflection and maintaining a language to speak with others about feelings, emotions, relations. I’m all for supporting one another through times of intense emotions. But I won’t give away the authority over my inner world of feeling to a professional working by the logic of a capitalist state I otherwise reject and let my unwellness about the rotten state of the world be dismissed as a disorder that is just happening in my own head.
Actually, I was referred to a few other lines of therapy and coping before psychiatry, none of which helped me. And I am absolutely not discouraged from figuring out why on my own. Psychiatry helped me focus on the why under my own power. Even though that wasn’t facilitated by the psychiatrist, I did take the time (and still do) to figure out why I feel this way. The medications are a tool to help me do that.
Right, but I absolutely do have the “is really sad syndrome”. Like I would be stuck in bed all day doing nothing and watching the world go by without meds, like I was before I started taking them. Even if we lifted the burden of capitalism, my brain has developed around that reality. I need chemical help to do stuff. It would have been nice to not have grown up in a world like that, but the damage is done, and I have to cope.
These substances are no more experimental than recreational drugs. Frankly, they are extremely well studied for the most part. And we do need to improve the scientific rigor behind psychiatry, absolutely, 100% with you. But that doesn’t mean that in the interim, we can’t do liberatory work with the nascent tools that psychiatry offers us.
Neither will I. Neither do I. The authority of the “bootmaker” (here the psychiatrist) is not absolute.
So is the authority of the bootmaker invalid if they are working by the logic of the capitalist state? Because to some extent yes, it does temper the authority I delegate to my psychiatrist! But that doesn’t mean that their expertise is completely unusable. E.g. medical professionals in other fields also operate under the logic of a capitalist state to various extents.
I’ve had ‘really-sad’ for years and still have. I was glad at first to have found a word for it, and to have found the chemical imbalance theory (yes it was a theory, in the meantime debunked). It took a few decades to understand that the psychiatry narrative of my ‘really-sad’ is close to an accurate description, but hides the real causes of it. Psychiatry never mentions the failures in our societies as causes of the unwellness but treats the unwellness as individual failure, and that’s not an innocent error to make.
I completely agree. But for me, this does not make psychiatry a hierarchy. It makes psychiatry a framework tainted by the logic of capitalism. And if it’s too tainted for you to trust, I completely sympathize. But I do still believe that, despite its foundational flaws, it is still capable of being liberatory, even in its nascent stage as a science.
Really, I wanted to respectfully push back on the notion that leftists who use or support the use of psychiatry have failed to consider the abuses that psychiatry has committed upon us. I have. And I’m living the consequences of my analysis.
With respect and personal experience, like any other tool, it can create and destroy. You may not be responsible for your troubles, you are responsible for healing them.
You’re against psychiatry being abused. Psychiatry is simply the process of providing (broadly) medical help to people with mental problems. People doing it wrong does not mean it as a concept needs to be abandoned.
Eeeeh … okay, but one has to pick apart ‘Psychiatry’ so much that not much will be left of it in the end. Look at its history, look at the science. The useful part you end up with is more often than not therapy, which again ends up more often than not being common sense advice you would give your best friend. And what most psychiatric diagnosis really boils down to is that when you subject people to stressful living conditions like poverty, war, displacement, authoritarianism etc. they develop mental problems.
And medication? Yes, some of it somewhat sometimes works, but in its current state it’s such a crude game of trial and error that I’d rather stay away, I feel actually safer self-medicating with plants and mushrooms.
you are far too generous to describe the big-pharma frenzy of overmedicalisation as simple ‘trial and error’. Maybe a clinician trying to use their tools to hit a moving target requires using trial and error, but the manufacturing of physically addictive drugs which only work to mask symptoms is anything but an accident
100
Your faith in “common sense” is commendable but I wouldn’t want to subject anyone but a trained professional to the stress of having to listen to me whine about my issues and then also having to dissect them to help me find the underlying issues.
Common sense is ignorant AF. Don’t self-medicate.
If you give your common sense a little credit and learn to trust your gut your might find it all quite competent - if not even wise. I’d say it took a few years of adjustment to get from being authority-oriented to self-stable, but I wouldn’t want to change back.
The POTUS goes by gut.
A very sound argument to make. Hitler liked puppies. Well done, okay I’ll get back on the prescription meds right now
That’s quite a leap from what was said, but any excuse will do.
YAY FOUND
i medical anarchist as whole medicine tho