3. critical perspectives in mental health

Humours, chemicals, and medicine

• Hippocrates taught that the healthy body had a balance of four basic humours.

• The popular belief that mental illness is due to chemical imbalance in the brain is a myth, like humoral theory.

• Elizabeth Packard drew attention to the need for regulation, oversight, and attention to people’s rights who have been institutionalized

dominance of western, biomedical psychiatry

• Excludes diverse perspectives.

• Disproportionate representation of marginalized people.

• Individual Mental Health Issues, “Trauma” vs. Collective Political Problems

“WE’VE ALWAYS DONE IT THIS WAY".”

mad studies

• counterexpertise

  • lived experience of “mental illness.”

• appropriation by psy-complexes

  • Concepts of recovery and peer-support.

• “We’ve always done it this way”

  • We must privilege lived experience.

centering lived experiences

• a space of social action

  • theorize about oppression and psy-violence while centering the lived experiences of those labels with psychiatric diagnoses.

• multiple approaches

  • Social, Relational, Identity-based and Anti-Oppressive Approaches

• decolonize mental health

  • Overrepresentation, suppression, and erasure of the experiences of racialized mad people

ideology in mad theory

• dominant discourse

  • “Being psychiatrized is like being colonized.”

  • Erases the experience of BIPOC people who are simultaneously resisting psychiatry and colonialism.

• sanism or stigma?

  • “Systematic subjugation of people who have received ‘mental health’ diagnoses or treatment.”

  • Sanism has the potential to account for both discrimination, and for psychiatric violence.

pathologizing feminity

• hysterical personality disorder

• borderline personality disorder

• premenstrual dysphoric disorder and premenstrual syndrome

hysterical personality disorder

• The modern incarnation of hysteria, characterized by excitability, emotional instability, over-reactivity, and self-dramatization.

• Renamed Histrionic Personality Disorder in 1980

borderline personality disorder

• Categorized by “feminine qualities” including depression, emotional lability, impulsivity or unpredictability that is considered self-damaging such as..

  • spending

  • sex

  • gambling

  • shoplifting

  • overeating

premenstrual dysphoric disorder and premenstrual syndrome

• A range of psychological and physical symptoms that occur premenstrually, including..

  • anxiety

  • tearfulness

  • irritability

  • anger

  • depression

  • aches and pains

  • bloating

intersectionality

• We all have multiple cultural and social identities

• being a member of multiple marginalized or minority groups can exacerbate vulnerability to misdiagnoses

trauma therapy

• A FEMINIST CRITIQUE

  • The pervasiveness of the trauma concept has resulted in a one-dimensional view of the trauma survivor.

  • Lack of accountability for governments and global social inequity.

  • Circular use of language de-politicizes gender-based violence.