@withasmoothroundstone - this is in place of reblogging this, because the original post is getting long. I just wanted to add to some of the points you made so don’t feel pressured to respond.
Your point about how the modern psychiatry movement erases or excludes people who don’t agree or don’t fit the “right” narrative makes a lot of sense to me. Because I agree with a lot of antipsychiatry principles and experiences, there really isn’t much room for me in the current (psychiatric) disability rights movement.
One line of bad reasoning I sometimes see goes like this: Psychiatry isn’t perfect, but it helps a lot of people so we can’t be too critical of it, want to change it very much, or talk about how bad it is that a lot of people are hurt by it. When I talk to people in-person about how damaging antipsychotics were for me when I was psychotic, they start chiming in with “It’s not that way for everyone” or “You don’t want to convince anyone to go off of their meds.”
Which is true, I know it’s not the same for everyone and I don’t want to make someone feel like they shouldn’t be on medication when it’s helping them, but they aren’t thinking about the flaws in their worldview. They aren’t acknowledging that psychiatric drugs are not helpful for everyone. Or that for some people, tapering off of psychiatric medication without support is the least bad option.
And a lot of the time, it is not about the best option, because with the current system we don’t have the best option. The best option for me when I first became psychotic would probably have been something like a peer-run respite. But there were none in the state, so I went to a psychiatric hospital and was forced to take medication. There was no way that the best option could happen but there were a lot of feasible less bad options that nobody considered.
And in the neurodivergent community, like you said, people have this idea that either you believe in forced medication and institutionalization or you believe that people should never take medication and the current system should be abolished right now. You’re with us or you’re against us. You agree with everything about psychiatry or you agree with everything about antipsychiatry. Your widget idea makes sense and really explains why people do this.
(I don’t know enough about the history of antipsychiatry so thank you for explaining the “dissident psychiatrist” thing.)
