Burstow and LeFrançois Introduce the Book
Psychiatry is not about benevolence, care,
or help. While psychiatric apologists such as Edward Shorter (1997) have long
positioned psychiatry as the liberators of the mad, in actuality psychiatry
imprisons and oppresses people labeled “mad” in astronomical numbers. At no
time in earlier eras was the number caught within the auspices of the mad
professions anywhere near the number today. While psychiatry Supporters make
reference to the terror of Bedlam’ — currently still in operation, and the hospital
in medieval and Renaissance England synonymous with “booby hatch” and
memorialized in Shakespeare’s plays (see for example, poor Torn in King Lear) —
the reality is that at any given time during this period only twenty or thirty
people were actually held there; and as Porter (2002) makes clear, most people
thought of as mad were allowed to rove the countryside without incarceration
and without drugs. Such people were certainly often ill-treated — we are in no
way depicting these earlier times as good — but without the relentless
infringement that characterizes psychiatric practice today.
The history of psychiatry is the history of
a profession that ruthlessly drove out all of its competitors — the women
healers, the astrologers, ultimately even the psychoanalysts — and completely
medicalized any and all conceptualizations of madness, developing both a
“mental illness” construct and a world-wide crisis of iatrogenically-created
drug addicts. In the epistemological violence of diagnosis, in the chemical
violence of drugs that place one’s very brain into a strait jacket, psychiatry
attacks women. By the same token, it attacks seniors. It attacks racialized
people. It attacks trans populations. It attacks children. It attacks poor
people. However, what is most pernicious about this institution is that it
attacks not only these otherwise oppressed groups, it attacks everyone — all
this in the name of help. One need only look at the multiplication of diagnoses
in the progressive versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (D S M),
to realize that this profession is intent on having more and more people under
its auspices. This is an institution that is ultimately about pathologizing and
“treating” everyday life.
We stand in a long and proud tradition of
resistance. It may be argued that resistance to psychiatry is as old as
psychiatry itself, albeit it is not until the nineteenth century that we find
clear records of such resistance. In the nineteenth century, American
psychiatric prisoner Elizabeth Packard brought a writ of habeas corpus against
her husband who attempted to reinstitutionalize her; and, simultaneously,
Hersilie Rouy, a psychiatrized woman in France and Mary Huestis Pengilly, a
psychiatrized woman in Canada were engaged in similar activism (St-Amand and
LeBlanc 2013). However we date it, there has long been not only resistance hut
organized resistance to this institution. Inmates have demonstrated against it,
scholars have written about it. Feminized and racialized people have objected to
the targeting of their communities. Historians such as Foucault, moreover, have
rigorously sought out and surfaced subjugated knowledges.
At times — and necessarily so — this
resistance is tied intimately to identity politics. This has been enormously important
and, indeed, the ongoing theorizing and resistance to psychiatry by women in
particular has contributed substantially to the unmasking of psychiatry as an
untenable, patriarchal, and otherwise oppressive institution. As such, identity
politics has an absolutely essential role to play. In no way should that
reality ever be questioned. As with all identity politics, however, identity
politics in this area can at times tip into being exclusionary — and it is this
that we question. The need to keep “other” theorists with “other” identities
(or those who refuse to identify) at bay may be most keenly felt by people who
openly identify as psychiatric survivors, mad, or “service users.” People who
identify as such often do not want sane-identified people theorizing or
engaging in activism on their behalf. This is understandable given the history
of harm, domination, and co-optation by seemingly like-minded radical
therapists and academics who have benefitted from inequitable alliances with
psychiatrized people over the past half century. The marginalization, by
seemingly radical therapists, of psychiatric survivors in the U S A that led to
the creation of their psychiatric survivor movement is a clear example of such
unconscionable domination. Indeed, there are times in every movement, and there
are times in the lives of oppressed people, where it becomes important to keep
people who do not share that oppressed identity at bay. Nonetheless, in the
long run such divisions do not serve us, do not contribute to the task at hand.
Neither is it tenable to artificially create dichotomies and divisions between
activists and academics, between the openly psychiatrized and those who may
refuse classification of their experiences or those who have escaped
psychiatrization. The point is, given that we are all at risk of
psychiatrization, we cannot afford to exclude the work and theorizing of anyone
engaging in radical or mad activist scholarship, if we are to succeed. We
indeed want to underscore how critical the psychiatric survivor voice is in
engaging in a psychiatric survivor analysis (Finkler, 2013). However, identity
politics alone will not win this fight — any more than the fight against
classism would be won if we understood socialism as something that should only
be theorized by and fought for by low-wage earners. While honouring the
enormous importance of madness-related identity politics, accordingly, we
theorize resistance against psychiatry as we would any other (r)evolution:
something that demands the attention of all who are critical and where everyone
has a role to play.
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