#danielle carr

[shrinkrants]

Psychiatry Won’t Solve Our Mental Health Crisis — Only Politics Can Do That

Politicians want to improve our worsening mental health with big psychiatric initiatives. The problem with this model, says historian of neu

Politicians want to improve our worsening mental health with big psychiatric initiatives. The problem with this model, says historian of neuroscience Danielle Carr, is that it ignores the social and structural forces causing widespread mental suffering. ...

We are in a moment now in which many of the criticisms of psychiatry that were characteristic of the late ’60s and early ’70s are being recapitulated. I think we can look back at the antipsychiatry movement and say that, while there were gains here and there — especially around the destigmatization of homosexuality, or installing different forms of patient protections in psychiatric treatment — ultimately the gains that were made were overtaken, co-opted, and folded into the consumerization of American medicine. This is the legacy that it falls to us to inherit, to deal with, and to contest.

The antipsychiatry movement’s biggest failure was that it took the biological to be the opposite of the political, rather than a site where politics happens. Where it did its best work was in imagining different institutions of care that were not necessarily divorced from different projects of the welfare state. But the problem was that the Left had not built enough power to ensure that those alternate modes actually came into being. Long-term care facilities were dismantled in the name of establishing community mental health clinics — and they did this first part, but then the community mental health clinics never quite got around to being funded.

When we look into the future, and when we think about what a left project for resuscitating a robust critique of psychiatry would be, I think that the lesson that we have to take is that a dialectical materialist approach is an approach that takes biology seriously, but understands that the biological body transforms in relation to an environment that far exceeds the medical interventions possible in a clinic.

[longingforlavender]

A fiery ocean of swirling clouds

[shrinkrants]

social scientists have a term, “reification,” for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce. For people in power, the reification sleight of hand is very useful because it conveniently abracadabras questions like “Who caused this thing?” and “Who benefits?” out of sight. Instead, these symptoms of political struggle and social crisis begin to seem like problems with clear, objective technical solutions — problems best solved by trained experts. In medicine, examples of reification are so abundant that sociologists have a special term for it: “medicalization,” or the process by which something gets framed as primarily a medical problem. Medicalization shifts the terms in which we try to figure out what caused a problem, and what can be done to fix it. Often, it puts the focus on the individual as a biological body, at the expense of factoring in systemic and infrastructural conditions. -- Danielle Carr

[longingforlavender]

Somewhere…

[shrinkrants]

I think that concerns around mental health, which really are proxies for concerns about suffering, are integral to what we are doing as revolutionary-minded people trying to build a more just society. What’s united a lot of my thinking at a global level is the instinct that a left project cannot just import a conceptual vocabulary from liberals — and as a field, psychiatry is largely defined by a liberal conceptual vocabulary. It’s baked into the conceptual DNA of the field. So my work generally wants to push us to develop a different set of concepts for thinking about the question of suffering, psychiatric illness, affect and so on. -- Danielle Carr

[longingforlavender]

Hopping on this AI trend was a great idea 😍