Upping the Anti: Psychiatrization, Survival, and the Politics of Alterity

Abstract

Based on archival research (1970s to 1990s), media analysis (January 2006 through January 2011), and ethnographic fieldwork (August 2009 through September 2010) conducted in and around the Canadian city of Toronto, this dissertation explores a jarring disconnect between mainstream representations of psychiatric illness and intervention, and psychiatric survivors’ representations of the same experiences. Whereas the news media consistently portray the brains and bodies of psychiatrized people as existential threats to the national body politic, those with firsthand knowledge of the pathway from medicalization to medication frequently advance very different claims: that it is psychopharmaceutical compounds and not “mental illnesses” that usurp and assail people’s rational faculties and derail cherished aspirations, and that it is dissent rather than compliance that confers health. Due to both the extensive credibility that psychiatry enjoys throughout civil society and pharmaceutical firms’ enthusiasm for marketing not just drugs but diseases, individuals who are averse to medical intervention must contend with the twin stigmata of diagnosis and distrust; fully aware that they are viewed as unruly and inauthentic by both the public and their own families, they learn to dissemble and prevaricate about their lives in acts of protective self-silencing. Because forcible detention is always a latent threat, there is little manoeuvring room for people who wish to recover from lives of hardship but emphatically reject the equation of recovery with biological normalization, and of madness with illness. Over the past four decades, psychiatrized individuals have counterbalanced their marginality by mobilizing under collective identifiers like “anti-psychiatry,” “psychiatric inmates’ liberation,” “the psychiatric survivor movement,” and “mad pride,” and militating against prejudicial attitudes toward behavioural deviance. While these efforts have born some fruit, the overwhelming predominance of white voices in all of these communities has led to the trivialization or erasure of other genres of injustice, an outcome that has not gone unnoticed by participants who are both racialized and psychiatrized. The dissertation thus concludes by considering how collective identity labels can be just as alienating and silencing as psychiatric labels to those who transgress received criteria for virtuous conduct that mask, and thereby reinforce, hegemonic social norms.