aurora light

stigma & the psychiatric complex

may is mental health awareness month, and the fact that it’s “awareness” and not “acceptance” means you KNOW my antipsych ass was going to start talking about how the psychiatric complex doesn’t take us seriously.

so, let’s talk.

the intention behind months like this is to break down the stigma of various mental health concerns. the idea that the general public often has is that stigma is a one-way street: the average person has stigma toward mental health challenges, and if you can beat that stigma, then you can “access care,” which fixes your problems, eventually.

right?

this is, as i’m sure you either guessed or know yourself, an overly simplistic view of stigma surrounding mental health challenges.

the truth of the matter is that, while all non-”typical” mental health experiences face stigma, some are more highly stigmatized by others. many of the more stigmatized disorders—DID, schizophrenia, NPD, and more—are also heavily stigmatized by the psych field.

for those with heavily stigmatized experiences, being open with a psychiatrist about the experiences you’re having—even if those experiences are not putting other people at risk—can lead to a loss of autonomy that can be immensely damaging and traumatic.

having non-harmful hallucinations? a psychiatrist may push you (or, in some cases, be able to force you) to take medication that may reduce the consistency of your hallucinations, regardless of whether you’re interested and regardless of your tolerance for side effects.

having personal religious experiences classed as “delusions”? a psychiatrist may push you toward medication or therapy that may ask you to gaslight yourself out of this spiritual belief for the comfort of those around you.

overwhelmed by autistic burnout and perceived as a woman? a psychiatrist is not unlikely to misread these symptoms as coming solely from bipolar disorder, then put you on a high dose of anti-seizure medications for many years to control it, causing you to develop a lifelong tic disorder.

(i know that last one happens because it happened to me!)

bodily autonomy is always critical

so much of what the psychiatric complex does to people with stigmatized diagnoses stems from the fact that when you’re ill enough, many people feel perfectly comfortable removing your bodily autonomy.

while there are conversations that can be had about revoking bodily autonomy when someone is in danger of hurting another person, that’s not what i’m talking about.

people labeled as “seriously mentally ill” can have their bodily autonomy revoked if they are in danger of harming themselves, or even if they are not, but they are acting in ways that are unfamiliar or inconvenient to the institution around them.

it is a harrowing but important truth that bodily autonomy includes the ability to make choices that hurt you. bodily autonomy includes the ability to act in ways that are unhealthy. bodily autonomy includes the ability to act in ways that create wounds and scars.

when you have cancer, you are legally allowed to refuse lifesaving care. when you have schizophrenia, you are not. the stigma of these diagnoses is far-reaching, and can lead to legal discrimination, distrust from many of your personal circles, and a debilitating lack of personal choice.

stigma from our community

this isn’t even touching on the ways that these experiences are often, indeed, stigmatized by our own communities, a form of self-cannibalism that can lead to stigmatized members being pushed even further away.

how often do you see people in our own communities talking about “narcissistic abuse”—a concept that has not been scientifically validated, but nonetheless persists in pop psych circles? how often do you see people in our communities mocking non-normative spiritual beliefs by referring to them as “delusional” and “psychotic”? how often do you see people in our communities mocking the concept of self-diagnosis, as if anyone is hurting themselves by trying to access community resources that may benefit them, even if the psychiatric field wouldn’t believe them to have a specific diagnosis?

it is EXHAUSTING seeing members of your own community tear you and people like you down in a desperate attempt at gaining legitimacy. no one cares that you’re “not like those crazy mentally ill people”—the mainstream doesn’t respect you, and throwing us under the bus won’t make them do it.

we all deserve more options

antipsychiatry and mad pride isn’t about believing there is no benefit to medication or about believing that the strain of a traumatic mental health experience isn’t real. it’s about believing that the way we’ve chosen to treat these things in the west is fundamentally broken and evil.

it is an unavoidable truth that, in the same way police were developed from slave patrols, our current psychiatric system was built from the pathologization of oppressed peoples. personality disorders, as a category, were developed by looking at incarcerated people and trying to determine what illnesses they were suffering from that caused their criminality. our modern suicide prevention methods were developed to prevent newly enslaved people from harming themselves.

these diagnoses CAN be helpful: having a word for a stigmatized experience can provide comfort for many. oftentimes, these words also become communities; autistic people, for example, often find comfort in our diagnoses because it allows us to understand that we aren’t just “weird”; other people exist with a similar brain pattern.

but antipsychiatry says that we deserve the opportunity to live on our own terms, whether or not we embrace diagnosis.

some may find it incredibly helpful to utilize multiple diagnostic labels to express their experiences. some may prefer not to use any diagnostic labels at all, interpreting their experiences solely through a lens of spirituality, societal trauma, or something else. some may use a mixture of the two approaches.

the western understanding of psychiatry only validates mental health experiences that already have a title and are gatekept by doctors. antipsychiatry is the belief that all mental health experiences—normative and non-normative—are important parts of your life, and YOU deserve the ability to decide how you interpret that experience and how you perceive yourself as part of it.

we will never achieve liberation from ableism under capitalism. as long as the system of institutional psychiatry and the cops it creates are still within our community, we will continue to experience societywide ableism.

antipsychiatry is a path to health for all of us—stigmatized and non-stigmatized.