L3 Critical Perspectives in Mental Health

elizabeth packard

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

mad studies

• counterexpertise

  • lived experience of mental illness

• appropriation by psy-complexes

  • concepts of recovery and peer support

• we’ve always done it this

  • we must privilege lived experience

centering lived experience

• a space of social action

  • theorize about oppression and psy-violence while centering the lived experiences of those labels w 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 or both discrimination and for psychiatric violence

hysterical personality disorder

• the modern incarnation of hysteria, charactertized in excitability, emotional instability, over reactivity, and self-dramatization

• renamed histrionic personality disorder in 1980s

borderline personality disorder

• categorized by ”female qualities” including depression, emotional lability, impulsitivity, or unpredictability that is considered self-damaging (ie spending, sex, gambling, shoplifting, overreacting, etc.)

premenstrual dysphoric disorder & premenstrual syndrome

• a range of psychological and physical symptoms that occur premenstrually, including anxiety, tearfulness, irritability, anger, depression, aches and pains, or 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

trauma & women’s narratives

• trauma therapy privileges the telling of stories as a means for recovery

• trauma therapists maintain the capacity to design and analyze women’s experiences

• rare for therapeutic endeavours to engage in broader conversations about the need for social change