okay but are you anti-psychiatry like "involuntary commitment destroys patient trust and behavioral health is mostly about making you convenient for others" or are you anti-psychiatry like "the government uses SSRIs to turn people into zombies and ADHD isn't real"
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in reply to @pervocracy's post:
Exactly. I have many criticism of the way psychiatry is practiced, of the way mentally hill are treated by professional, on the way the DSM is written, but I despised getting lumped in with fucking scientology.
My criticism of the way antipsychotic medication are used doesn't mean I'm against medications! I take ADHD med, there great!
i need to research the subject matter cuz i hear ther term thrown around a lot and do not really understand. do you have any recommendations of things to read to learn about this (essays, blogs, books, videos, etc)
tbh I'm not super knowledgeable about it, sorry
Thomas Szasz is a figure who comes up a lot but he's... complicated because his work is a big mix of:
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things that were true in the 60s when he was writing them, and there was a lot more institutionalization and most psychiatric medications were basically "this will sedate you so much that you won't cause trouble", but are not as true now
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still-relevant criticisms of the psychiatric system operating like a shadow justice system and conflating deviance with pathology
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just plain denying the existence of organic brain disease, which, okay, that's not even "of it's time" or "in a certain light" it's just factually incorrect
i appreciate your commentary nonetheless! do you know anyone who may know some good references?
No, I only know about the guy I don't like plus a bunch of scattered online discourse, sorry to not be of much help
Sorry to butt in but if you're still looking for more details: This jacobin article: https://jacobin.com/2022/03/anti-psychiatry-movement-mental-illness-psychological-suffering may serve as a useful broad introduction to the topic (both pros and cons). I do think it is a little reductionist in its view of the biopsychosocial model and the pharmaceutical piece may have an american-centric view of their influence on the field while placing inadequate emphasis on the economic incentives for services prioritising medication over psychotherapeutic input.
Joanna Moncrieff is a current psychiatrist who is involved with 'critical psychiatry' (and is currently controversial, see recent discussions over a publication of hers on SSRIs) - she has a blog here: https://joannamoncrieff.com/blog-2/.
If you're interested specifically in the historical forms, R D Laing is another classic antipsychiatrist from the 60s who has a mix of good points and somewhat concerning ones, your mileage on his schizophrenia perspective may vary. "The Divided Self" is his classic.
If you're looking for responses to Laing and Szasz, Anthony Clare's "Psychiatry in Dissent" has some counterpoints that are contemporaneous with those arguments.
As a rule, anti-psychiatrists in the contemporary sense tend to take one of four forms: current or former patients who have legitimate grievances over their experiences with psychiatry; psychologists and psychiatrists who believe there should be no or considerably less biological intervention in mental illness; right-wing people who would prefer not to pay to support people they consider inferior; and scientologists.
thanks for the help, and no need to apologize, you are not butting in! help is help. i just largely want to understand the way other people think because i think its wrong to agree with or dismiss something outright without learning things about the subject matter first. it just seems kind of outrageous at first listen since i struggle to function without my medicine which i think sincerely helps me and ive heard people suggest that medication is bad outright and that contradicts my lived experience
it’s definitely hard to understand when you have a clear picture of how much meds help when they do help! some people have extraordinarily negative experiences (psych meds do have some nasty side effects in fairness) and there is fair concern about how widely certain things are prescribed, particularly in places where medication might be free or part covered by insurance but other input is very expensive. as with anything, a few people will tend to extremes!
understandable. i have had some deeply influential and profoundly negative experiences with perscribed medicines before which are now largely illegal to perscribe so recklessly as they were when i received them, so i can definitely understand that kind of thing, its just hard to grasp why someone would go after the concept, which is why im curious if its more about the concept or the institution
I think people find it hard to separate the concept and the institution! Historically they do go together, and an easy way to de-legitimise psychiatry as a concept is to go after its only unique feature - the prescribing of psychiatric medication. There is maybe also an element that certain professions e.g. psychology devalue the thing they can’t do. And even in physical medicine there are people who think chemotherapy and antibiotics and so forth are ineffective, despite the wealth of evidence in favor! But Cliff is right that the denial of organic neurological illness is necessary to be a ‘pure’ anti psychiatrist and that’s hard to get behind. In reality a lot of modern perspectives are a bit softer on meds (in a ‘we’re using too much’ way, rather than a ‘this never works for anyone’ way)
Then you get the people that think the old mental hospitals were a good thing or even want to bring them back because "Reagan shut down the mental hospitals and that's why we have a mental health crisis" is a good lib sound byte
there is no fucking way people believe that (not serious but i wish i was)
Anti-psychiatry like “you used what you thought were empathetic methods to try to help me function as an autistic kid , but instead gaslit me for years, manipulated me to be more convenient to others at the expense of my own well-being, and left me with lifelong trauma that gives me have panic attacks at the mere THOUGHT of being near a psychologist.”
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