Validity Will Not Liberate Us, Notes From a Psych Survivor
Recently, I was scrolling through social media when I was struck by how almost every profile bio I came across included a diagnosis or label. Similarly, terms like ”hyperfixation”, “time-blindness”, and “boundaries” are all becoming more and more prevalent both online and in person, in workplace discussions and smoking area chatter. I don’t want to berate people for describing themselves however they see fit, but with increasing and uncritical usage of medical model language, are we starting to pathologise the very logical reactions we are having to a society designed to drive us mad?
Let me add some context. I have spent years dealing with the violence of a psychiatric system that pathologised, dehumanised and incarcerated me. Slapped with whatever diagnosis was the easiest gagging tool, the only silver lining was that the legitimacy of these labels fell apart before my very eyes. I am scared these diagnostic labels are becoming more than just identifying features that help people contextualise their experiences. They are acting as a barrier to meaningful solidarity with one another, in favour of individualising the systemic issues we all face. We are pathologising ourselves out of solidarity.
This is not to undermine anyone’s experiences. There have been enough bad faith think-pieces over the past few years denouncing the existence of labels such as ADHD without a rigorous analysis of the conditions that have led to such a rise in people’s identification with it. We live under a capitalist system that deliberately alienates us, destroys community infrastructure and enforces housing and employment precarity. On top of that, we have spent the last four years forced to fend for ourselves as a deadly virus massacres our communities. Our entire world has been restructured by this pandemic, and with that, our ability to function and the shape of our lives has changed with it. It is understandable that some reach to these diagnostic frameworks as an explanation.
But whilst the intention might be to make sense of our struggles, we risk distracting from the world around us by individualising the collective experiences we should be organising against, and further alienating the millions of us who have experienced violence at the hands of the psychiatric system.
I also don’t think I should have to qualify myself as ‘Mad actually, so I can speak on this’, because anyone sincerely invested in a better world should feel able to critique the issues corroding our movements. This is actually one part of the problem; we have replaced meaningful political analysis and theoretical frameworks with solely individual experiences, as opposed to using each to inform one another, as the Combahee River Collective intended.
None of this is intended to downplay the barriers we each face in day-to-day life. However, consider how dangerous it is to start deeming any traits outside of ‘normalcy’ as a ‘mental disease’. What parameters are we using to define this normalcy, and who’s narrative does this serve?
Women escaping abusive husbands are ‘hysterical’. Rastafari in british-occupied Jamaica were declared ‘insane’ for growing locs and supporting anti-colonial ideology. Black Panthers arming themselves against a murderous white supremacist state are ‘schizophrenic’. Anti-colonial fighters from Egypt to Ireland to Vietnam to Mozambique are ‘psychopaths’. Muslims that live under a surveillance state that brands them terrorists are ‘paranoid’. Working class people dying at the hands of benefits sanctions are suicidal because of a ‘chemical imbalance of serotonin’.
What is killing us? Who is killing us?
Why are we so desperate to place our personhood in diagnostic categories that have only ever been used to obscure oppression and erode our autonomy?
The first standardised version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was published in 1952. It began with 102 disorders, and now contains over 300. Some of the more controversial, less internet-popular, include:
- prolonged grief disorder
- schizoid personality disorder (‘a tendency toward a solitary or sheltered lifestyle’)
- histrionic personality disorder (hysteria)
- schizotypal personality disorder (‘anxiety in social situations, odd behaviour and thinking, and often unconventional beliefs’)
- gender identity disorder
- oppositional defiant disorder
- night eating syndrome
The most recent edition of the DSM was edited in complete secrecy — all task force members had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Two of those task force members have supported the idea of ‘corrective treatment’ for trans youth, coded psychiatric language for conversion therapy. This is less surprising considering conversion therapy was psychiatry’s very own invention and their chosen mode of ‘treatment’ for sociopathic personality disturbance (homosexuality), which was present in the DSM until 1973.
The majority (69%) of DSM-5 taskforce members also have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. An ever expanding list of ‘disorders’ and ‘illnesses’ that are classed as ‘biologically innate’, sidelining social factors, is a perfect money-making enterprise for the producers of pharmaceutical drugs.
How can we create chemical ‘cures’ for ‘psychiatric disorders’ that have no biomarkers to determine them? If people get better, they stop taking the drugs they needed when they were unwell. So what incentive is there for the profit-driven pharmaceutical industry to produce or prescribe drugs that actually work?
The rise in neoliberal mental health and wellness trends will have you believing that any critique of Big Pharma is ‘stigmatising mental illness’. You see, we are crazy Disabled people who don’t know what’s best for us. We should take our little meds that give us tardive dyskinesia, brain damage, heart and liver disorders, weakened bladders, substance dependency and seizures, and shut up!
To state the flaws within the diagnostic and pharmaceutical industries, even in supposedly radical spaces, is to declare yourself a pariah. Why is it so contentious of me to ask the so-called critical thinkers of the left to re-evaluate their obsession with the same diagnostic framework used, as we speak, to section Black people at a five times higher rate, take children away from working-class mothers and gatekeep trans healthcare?
Don’t get me wrong, diagnoses are tools we can and should use when necessary, especially when trying to get disability benefits or the medication we want, avoid certain institutional punishments or compounding forms of discrimination — most pertinently anti-Blackness — from medical professionals. The issue is not using labels when they are strategically useful, but when we begin to integrate them as objective truths and project that pathologisation onto our movements, our political strategy and one another.
It’s time we reflected on how this rise in the ‘politics of validity’ is actively sabotaging solidarity — we will never win if we do not critique ourselves and our movements. This is also situated in the context of a genocide ravaging Palestine, a genocide we have proven ourselves useless in halting. We have not harnessed our collective power in the imperial metropole to end the zionist violence being inflicted on Palestinians. That is a complete and utter political failure of our movements, me, you, all of us. There is no way we can continue as we are — we must reckon with our collective ineptitude and how we strengthen ourselves on the western left.
Psychiatric institutions wielded throughout history as a tool to suppress resistance will not liberate us. The Big Pharma industry funded by our sickness will not help us get well. A diagnostic framework invested in distracting us from the systemic violence that drives us Mad will not explain the roots of our distress.
Look around you. We cannot struggle for a better world if we are too busy coddling ourselves with individualism. Instead of using our experiences of exclusion or inaccessibility to form stronger bonds of solidarity with others in the Disability movement, some are wielding certain labels to dodge accountability and claim proximity to a form of oppression they rarely face. It seems fewer and fewer people are engaging with the radical tenants of Disability justice: the social model of Disability, deinstitutionalisation, ‘piss on pity’ campaigns and fighting against fascistic social security cuts that have led to over 600 ‘benefits deaths’ in just three years. Let this be the cue you need to break out of any individualising narrative that you might be trapped in, and remember the decades long struggle Disabled and Mad people have been waging against the institutions that infantilise us. It’s time we stopped doing their job for them. Your validation is not more important than the hundreds of people who die at the hands of psychiatry each year.
We must reject the attempt to let our complex lives, experiences and histories be reduced down to one label, one disorder. We deserve better. Our inability to conform to the violent boundaries racial capitalism sets must be an indicator that it is our society, not our personalities or brains, that is broken. We deserve a world that is able to adjust for all of us, not because we tick enough boxes of the ‘right’ label, but because every one of us is worthy of humanity, care and freedom. For the many people who currently seek comfort in diagnoses, we must figure out how we can provide this understanding outside of the neoliberal traps psychiatry sets for us.
Mental Healthcare in a Failing State
This blog is part of our new series, “Mental Healthcare in a Failing State”. All the blogs in the series, when published, will be added here.