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opinions on anti-psychiatry? (piefed.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 week ago by erinmeow@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/mentalhealth@lemmy.world

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my opinion will be later, but yes i am very anti-psychiatry

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[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@anarchist.nexus 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

Neither will I. Neither do I. The authority of the "bootmaker" (here the psychiatrist) is not absolute.

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.

[–] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@anarchist.nexus 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.