this poser antipsych guy i have class with just told me he “determined [his friend] wasn’t autistic thru observation and interview” . and like. basically checked it against the dsm and decided but said that they should probably get tested by a professional later. this guy who is Proudly Antipsych 😭😭 he’s constantly referencing the dsm criteria for everything. like he talks about the dsm and how cool it is all the time. i fear the word is losing meaning
i talk about antipsych as having two major component positions: an epistemological critique of the knowledge-claims that psychiatry makes, and an ethical critique of its motives and rewards for making such knowledge-claims. to me these two positions go hand in hand and mutually inform one another, but plenty of people are persuaded by one and not the other, or are familiar with one and lack facility with the other.
people who advance an epistemological antipsych argument without an accompanying ethical critique will tend to focus on psychiatry's chronic lack of empirical evidence, its inability to even settle on a consensus position re: the degree to which 'brain disease' is an essentially metaphorical way of speaking vs a number of actual biological entities, the vagueness and overlap of clinical psychiatric symptom lists, etc. however, without an accompanying ethico-political analysis of the role and purpose of psy-sciences in capitalist society, these people may also turn around and argue that psychiatrised people are therefore faking/malingering, are lazy, are simply being told they're 'special', need to pull up their bootstraps and be normal, etc. think of eg thomas szász
on the other hand people who make an ethical critique of psychiatry without a firm epistemological grasp of what they're talking about will tend to express opposition to practices like medical incarceration, coercive treatment, ruling a patient unable to consent, etc; however, they may still agree that the dsm labels are identifying 'real' dysfunction/defects, and the trick is simply to design a more compassionate system to deal with such people. especially this attitude tends to come out wrt diagnoses considered more 'severe' such as schizophrenia, bipolar 1, or other presentations with psychosis; it's also popular in these circles to claim that xyz psych diagnoses (often autism, but not exclusively) are different because they are 'neurotypes'/developmental disorders/cognitive disabilities/etc. you can imagine how this might become a popular position in an effort to preempt the type of epistemological critique described above with its corollary assertion that the distress or dysfunction reported by psychiatrised people must not be 'real', because it's not empirically evidenced.
imo plenty of people holding versions of these two positions are genuinely committed to antipsych as they define the term, which is why arguing with them baffles them so much. but these critiques will never amount to anything until an understanding of what's wrong morally is integrated with an understanding of what's wrong philosophically in the psychiatric system
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