Whatever you may think about it -- and different people have
dramatically different assessments -- most Canadians are acutely aware that the
University of Toronto is a central hub for institutional psychiatry, with CAMH
(Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) being one of its most famous research
institutes as well as one of its mega teaching hospitals. Did you know,
however, that Toronto universities are likewise famous for what is transparently
the opposite -- that is, for cutting edge critiques of psychiatry? And in the
latter, let me suggest, we seekers of social justice can truly take pride.
Some history: The very first course on working with
traumatized people anywhere in the world that operates from an antipsychiatry
perspective was introduced over 15 years ago in the ever radical Adult
Education and Community Development program at Ontario Institute for Studies In
Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Called "Working with Survivors of
Trauma", it is still going strong, students scrambling every year to get
into this highly popular course. What is especially exciting about this course,
beyond that the type of engagement being upfronted is fully consensual -- an
absolute must -- the course operates totally
outside of psychiatric frames (e.g., no use of psychiatric diagnoses or
language). Moreover, unlike every other trauma course in the world, instead of
psychiatry being conceptualized as a "resource" for traumatized
people, it is framed as a traumatizing institution which presents a danger to them
precisely because it acts as it does, moreover, precisely because is widely
accepted as the ultimate “resource”. By the same token, just as students gain cutting
edge skills for helping traumatized peoples and communities "work
through", "expand their coping repertoire", and on a more political
level, resist, one of the skills acquired in this course is how to help traumatized
folk and communities become adept at protecting themselves precisely from psychiatric and other intrusion by "professionals",
irrespective of whether or not such intrusion is called "help".
Speaking of radical reframing!
A slightly later but related development was kickstarted at Ryerson
University (located in central Toronto). At the instigation of mad history
specialist Dr. Geoffrey Reaume (now a long term faculty member at York
University), it introduced the world’s very first Mad History course. This development,
I would add, occurred shortly after Reaume had proposed just such a course to
University of Toronto, only to find it rejected offhand -- and in this, U of
T's lack of foresight is evident.
The inclusion of this course in Ryerson was quickly followed
by the introduction of a Mad History course in Disability Studies at York
University (also located in Toronto), again courtesy of Dr. Geoffrey Reaume. Soon
with the aid of scholars like Reaume (York University), David Reville
(Ryerson), and Dr. Jennifer Poole (Ryerson), Mad Studies became a highly recognized
academic area in Canada. And before long Mad History and Mad Studies courses more
generally spread to Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, and other parts of the
world (see http://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/mad-studies/).
It remains at the same time a Canadian stronghold, as seen by the appearance of
such stellar Mad Studies tomes as Brenda LeFrançois, Robert Menzies, and
Geoffrey Reaume (2013).
What is exciting about such courses and areas is that the
perspectives explored are not those of professionals but rather those of folk deemed
mad. Herein we have what philosopher Michel Foucault (1980) so aptly calls “the
insurrection of subjugated knowledge”.
A further Toronto university breakthrough: In 2010 in
cooperation with leading antipsychiatry group Coalition Against Psychiatric
Assault, Adult Education and Community Development at OISE/UT mounted the historic
PsychOut Conference (see http://ocs.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/psychout/index/index).
This was the first conference ever whose focus was strategic resistance to
psychiatry. Widely attended, it culminated in printed proceedings (see http://individual.utoronto.ca/psychout/papers/lehmann.html).
It likewise inspired Bonnie Burstow's, Brenda LeFrançois's,
and Shaindl Diamond's (2014) book on the subversive art of crafting resistance
to psychiatry.
Yet a further development of note happened in 2014 -- again
at University of Toronto. People came from far and wide to OISE/UT to take a
series of workshops on how to use a radical approach to research called
“Institutional Ethnography” to investigate aspects of psychiatry. The purpose
of the workshops was nothing less than to help attendees learn how to trace seemingly
individual personal problems to the workings of institutional psychiatry, together
with the power conglomerates of which it is a part. The upshot of these
workshops were the formation of research teams. Composed of psychiatric
survivors, academics, and activists, the teams proceeded to employ this radical
methodology to investigate hitherto relatively unexplored nooks and crannies of
psychiatry. The product is the soon-to-be-released book “Psychiatry
Interrogated” (see http://www.springer.com/fr/book/9783319411736).
And then there is the pièce de la résistance -- which it has
been my pleasure to be integral to.
But days ago -- so this news is “hot off the press” -- yet
another important breakthrough materialized, once again at OISE, University of
Toronto. For the first time anywhere in the world an antipsychiatry scholarship
was set up. Known as the Dr. Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry, it
is a matching scholarship in which I am slated to match up to $50,000 dollars
in donations from others. And it will be awarded annually in perpetuity to OISE
students doing theses in the area of antipsychiatry.
To understand the significance of this scholarship, witness
these words by leading psychiatrist/psychiatric critic Dr. Peter Breggin:
I am Peter R.
Breggin, MD and I am a psychiatrist. As a professional long heralded as
the conscience of psychiatry, it is my pleasure to endorse the newly formed
Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry. Science is demonstrating that
psychiatric diagnosis and drugs, electroshock, and involuntary treatment are doing
much more harm than good. We desperately need critical scholarship aimed
at stopping this epidemic of demoralization, dehumanization, and brain
damage.
Likewise backing the scholarship, in her written endorsement,
Ontario MPP Reverend Cheri DiNovo draws attention to the scholarship's long-run
potential to help address inequities faced by psychiatric survivors.
Zeroing in more pointedly on the social movement dimension, Toronto
activist extraordinaire Don Weitz explains the significance of the scholarship
thusly, “It's time antipsychiatry is officially and widely recognized as a
legitimate and growing international movement. This Scholarship will help make
it happen.”
Correspondingly, survivor/activist/academic Dr. Lauren Tenney pinpoints
with rigour multiple ways in which the scholarship is significant, bringing in
intersectionality in the process, elegantly asserting:
How radical! How timely! We are so fortunate to have [here],
a visionary with a commitment to exposing psychiatry, and assisting people
making their way into the field, to not have to fight for a right to hold an
antipsychiatry position. State-sponsored organized psychiatric industries
target children, women, people of color, seniors, and people from oppressed
groups. The
opportunities such a scholarship program presents are enormous for the growth
of research that will hold psychiatry accountable. The important feminist,
anti-racist work that can be accomplished from an antipsychiatry framework is
significant, not only for those awarded this new scholarship, but for those
working with and near those in slated positions designed to allow people to
honestly speak out about the damages psychiatry creates. This brilliant move by
Burstow is a game-changer that will further solidify the growing field of
antipsychiatry in North America, and around the world. If you are able to
support this effort, please do so, today. -- Lauren Tenney, PhD, MPhil,
MPA, Psychiatric Survivor.
As these endorsers are well aware, as the scholars involved in every
one of the cutting edge endeavors outlined in this article too are aware, as
the throng of students benefiting from such developments are likewise aware, it
is precisely in breakthroughs such as these that we see universities at their
best -- not acting as the regimes of ruling (which they unquestionably are) but
daring to step away from vested interests to promote truly liberatory
scholarship. Not that any of this happened without struggle.
Insofar as we have such breakthroughs, it is because radical scholars itching
for universities to be real sites of liberating education pushed and keep on
pushing against the conservativism and the inherent intransigence in
universities. May the struggle continue!
Hopefully, we will see many more such developments not only
at Toronto universities -- but at sites of learning throughout this nation and beyond.
My own personal wish list for the near future is; the public mounting of hard-hitting
debates on the timely subject of psychiatry; the creation of departments of Antipsychiatry
and Mad Studies, and last but hardly least, the integration of antipsychiatry
into such currently (and woefully) psychiatry-dominated fields as psychology
and social work (for a discussion of psychiatry's wholesale colonization of
psychology and social work in North America, see Bonnie Burstow, 2015).
Correspondingly, I look to the day when every university will
consider their mission of advancing social justice and radical scholarship at
least somewhat incomplete without creating a space for demystifying psychiatry,
for promoting mad voices and "mad literacy", and for the
co-development of antipsychiatry strategies. Can you imagine how society might
change if our universities truly prioritized pedagogies of the oppressed in
such ways? By the same token, can you imagine what would happen if a good part
of the populace got behind such a transition? -- a vital question that I put to
the reader, for despite how impressive are the inroads made to date, without abundant
and radical community involvement, universities will only change so far. Or to
phrase this positively, we get what we make
happen.
That said, to end by highlighting the
scholarship at hand, for those wanting to learn more about this exciting new development
and/or eager to become part of what Tenney has so aptly dubbed this game-changing"
move, this history-in-the-making, go here (http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/oise/About_OISE/Bonnie_Burstow_Scholarship.html).
For queries that you might have, write: burstowscholarshipcommitee@gmail.com.
References
Burstow,
B. (2015). Psychiatry and the business of
madness. New York: Macmillan.
Burstow,
B., LeFrançois, B, and Diamond, S. (Eds). (2014). Psychiatry disrupted. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Foucault,
M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. New York:
Pantheon.
LeFrançois,
B., Menzies, R., and Reaume, G. (Eds.) (2013). Mad matters. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.
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