Being a graduate from 3 years of studying psych and with an active experience of mental illness, I can say that no amount of studying theory and doing therapy+ taking meds for years helped me realize the root of my problems and my worth as a human. more than Marxist analysis. I live to be a part of the revolution, and as long as psychotherapy reinforces the client to believe in themselves and to accept the realities of it is what it is, it will never achieve its job of liberating the person. There is a need for psychology to gain a Marxist perspective, more so from modern day leftists in the mental health field.
Sigh, here we go again…
There is certain truth that psychiatric treatment by itself in many occasions will not be as powerful to change a patient’s life for the better as it would be if this one was accompanied by a change of their life conditions: poor people suffer from more mental health issues than the rich, after all.
But what psychiatry does is more than just treat depression, or to be more specific, depression precipitated by poverty and capitalist exploitation. OCD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorders… The list goes on, and the role that psychiatry plays nowadays in their treatment is not one of enforcer and normalizer of capitalism, as some (banned) people here in lemmygrad are known for believing.
As a certified Bipolar, I still think this is a worthwhile conversation to have.
There can be aspects of a field of study that are worth preserving while others exist that are worth less than nothing.
My medication journey began with my involuntary instutionalization as a child because I told my mom I was so depressed I wanted to drop out of school. I was sent to a juvenile detention center (selling itself as a “behavioral health facility”). It was hell. I was a suicidal, depressed teenager now surrounded by other kids ranging from runaways to pyromaniacs to sex offenders to those with violent tendencies.
It took 7 years to get my meds where they needed to be for me to function, and another 2 to find a med combination I can be content with. For those 7 years, I took prozac. I do not speak lightly when I say those years fried the hell out of my brain, and it’s taken long, tumultuous years of work to try to unfry it.
I am glad for my meds. I attend pay-what-you-can therapy. The end goal of all of it, though, despite my intentions, despite my healthcare providers’ intentions – at a systemic level – is to transform me and other useless eaters into productive members of society, not fully actualized people.
Oh, and to sell meds at 2000x the price it costs to manufacture them, of course.
Tangential addendum: the DSM sucks and has a foundation rooted in oppression and repression of LGBT people and political dissidents. and the overly prescriptive nature of western psychiatry (as opposed to a more holistic view of mental health) is maintained by the effort of pharmaceutical and healthcare profiteers through captured agencies like the American Psychiatric Association.
I highly recommend the website https://www.madinamerica.com/ for an alternative view - what they call critical psychiatry.
I was horribly misdiagnosed as bipolar a while back and while the meds had barely any effect on me (positive or negative) their huge costs coupled with no help at all made my mental health worse than it was beforehand. I suspect that the diagnosis was so random for my conditions because it was the most medicable condition the “professional” could find to keep me coming back for more.
I have no issue with psychiatry as a field in the abstract though, just the health profiteering that passes as psychiatry in capitalism. That link there is interesting, thanks!
Oh well, Lemmygrad has taken a like not to notify me of replies to my posts so I missed yours until now.
I am not American, and thus I usually refuse to center the focus of conversations into the shape that capitalism particularly takes in the USA for its population and instead attempt to address capitalism globally, thus I will not go on into the form of healthcare that the US has in particular.
That being said: it is indeed a conversation to have. But I will add: it is a conversation to have with an important amount of investigation and research done previously. Issues regarding healthcare and the ways it can improve can, without a relative amount of education, easily deviate into anti-science discourse, with people identifying correctly the grasp that capitalism has into healthcare and its transformation to serve its own interests but, as a solution, decidint to proclaim instead psychiatry to be a “false science” that exists purely to control the population and generate profit with it.
Science is not immune to the material conditions of the society it exists in. Biology, and more specifically genetics was used once to legitimize colonialism because that was the world it existed in, but I doubt anyone with half a brain would consider that the world would be doing better if biology as a science did not exist due to its history. The same happens in medicine, including the field of mental health, with events such as the ones that the DSM has seen and that you have pointed out.
The point I am trying to make is simple: the existance of psychiatry under capitalism, despite its many faults, is still more benefitial to proletarians than it would be its non-existance. Psychiatry in particular and science in general must be seen not as willing servants of capital, but as its hostages.
I believe that I agree, generally.