Being a graduate from 3 years of studying psych and with an active experience of mental illness, I can say that no amount of studying theory and doing therapy+ taking meds for years helped me realize the root of my problems and my worth as a human. more than Marxist analysis. I live to be a part of the revolution, and as long as psychotherapy reinforces the client to believe in themselves and to accept the realities of it is what it is, it will never achieve its job of liberating the person. There is a need for psychology to gain a Marxist perspective, more so from modern day leftists in the mental health field.
I have talked about this with my psychologist, and with friends of mine who are psychologists, and we have arrived the same conclusion. There’s no amount of psychoanalysis that can cure a trauma caused by the material reality of a patient. You can give them coping skills, you can make them understand certain aspects of their psyche, but cannot advance any further without improving the material existence and this is something that is negated in psychoanalysis, basically. Psychology has divorced from the political realm, it needs to be reclaimed and be integrated into the framework of dialectical materialism.
There’s no amount of psychoanalysis that can cure a trauma caused by the material reality of a patient. You can give them coping skills, you can make them understand certain aspects of their psyche, but cannot advance any further without improving the material existence.
Exactly. This should be a repeated opening statement for anyone getting into therapy whether as a giver or receiver. Too often it’s treated as some mystical “science” whereby all of the patient’s ills can be therapized away with just enough inner effort (and money!). I’ve had many traumas to deal with and at the end of it all the singular thing that helped me the most was solving my basic material needs. Thankfully I came to the same realization as your statement on my own (after much introspection) before getting pathologized and needlessly medicated. I reailze there are people who may need the medication and all, but I’d wager that they are not the majority of people who end up there.
If it weren’t for psychiatry I would be dead. Dissuading people from getting help when they need it is not a good thing.
I’m glad it helped you but I never dissuaded anyone from getting help. I just emphasized the need for a Marxist perspective to be integrated in practice
Yes, but you are acting as this applies to all psychiatry and therapy.
No amount of material analysis can cure or treat PTSD, ADHD, Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder, or a multitude of other illnesses and disabilities that can only be fixed with medicine and assisting the person in walking through their thoughts and lives.
I feel like what you said was mostly targeted forwards anxiety and depression, but that is not all that therapy and psychiatry are.
I understand, what I mean isn’t supposed to apply for all of therapy or psychiatry, or even to all depressed and anxious patients. I just wanted to point out the systemic issue that psychologists need to understand and apply to so that it can be easily accessible to all. This is not limited to treatment of certain mental disorders, but also to the way mental health treatment is itself accessible to those who can’t afford it. I see how what I said may seem like a generalization, and I apologize for that.
No problem! Thank you for clearing up what you meant!
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia despite never having any positive symptoms. Recently when I was talking to my shrink she said that the main motivation for giving me the diagnosis was that insurance companies won’t cover treatment without it. Fuck private medicine.
I can’t get any pain treatment ever cus a nurse randomly wrote down I did meth over a decade ago when I was a teenager and talking about how only the Amphetamines (prescribed) worked for me. And no one will ever take it off lol ya I’m a minority group
They’ll also happily call one time use, or repeated occasional use of “more innocent” drugs like cannabis, “X use disorder”. You can be fully functioning, an occasional cannabis smoker, whose symptoms are both unrelated to cannabis use in theory and are confirmed unrelated by stopping usage and not getting symptom relief and yet they’ll call your occasional use “cannabis use disorder”. And there’s no recourse; you can’t have a diagnosis taken off your record. And of course in a situation where it’s your word against theirs, yours won’t be taken seriously, especially if you have a “drug use disorder”! Just like with non-mental health care, the patient being incentivized to lie to their healthcare provider is a horrible situation to be in, and leads to worse outcomes in general. It’s also infuriating that being honest about occasional responsible cannabis use means you automatically can not get prescribed several classes of drugs (some of which I have issues with on principle but that’s not the point): you can’t be prescribed stimulants, you can’t be prescribed benzodiazepines, you can’t be prescribed narcotic painkillers[1].
This isn’t law, it’s just operating standards at most places. Especially if you’re poor and are recieving government-provided mental health treatment where they have very strict, uniform standards for acceptable treatment by their providers. ↩︎
Where I live there’s a place that we called The Little House (La casita) which is like an evangelical rehabilitation clinic, a lot of kids get sent there, I have quite a couple of friends who were sent there, for smoking weed, and they give you shit like clonazepam, alplax, ketiapine and shit to “quit weed” and they get out of there literally fucked up in the brain because of how much pills they give them, so any parent can send their kids there.
Sounds like the old sounds asylums. Jfc.
Do they then also force those people to go advertise for it and collect donations to keep that shit going? We have something similar here and they do that a lot. Basically a religious legal drug gang.
I wonder how much of it is determined by the cost of some treatments. They’ll need a legitimate reason to deny it and this is ‘reasonable’ on the surface.
Oh look it’s a cia agent or maybe just an…
Systems ensure this will never happen at a systemic level, but it does happen at an individual level. My therapist is a Marxist, and no other therapist was ever able to help me, long long before I know about Marx.
Veteran lemmygradians will remember the anti-psychiatry story arc of our website
Its a worthy topic to bring up again, there are obviously people that took it too far and into the realm of ideology but I felt like a lot of people were also too dismissive.
It is. I just brought that up for amusement.
Oh totally, it was pretty entertaining
“oh boy, amicese 2!”
I still don’t think Amicese was that far offbase; just VERY prone-to-hostility-- which I’d be a hypocrite to condemn them for given I’m in a place where all my prior traumas have very much been materially-sourced, so I empathized hard as a motherfucker with some of the stuff they said.
True, but they were going to a dangerous degree.
No ethical, moral, or good willed person would EVER tell a schizophrenic, bipolar, ADHD, psychotic, or PTSD suffering person to go off of their meds and to avoid psychiatry.
That is a great way to raise the chance of suicide through the roof, or leading the person to ruin their life senselessly.
Amicese said a few decent things and accurately tackled how capitalism permeates medicine. But their advice was downright dangerous and intolerable.
I think it more comes from how a lot of supposed mental disorders, are more of a conflict of that individual and the society they live in. If society was structured in a way for ADHD people to be able to contribute that is structured around how their brain works, there wouldn’t be a disability in the first place. Not all, of course, but many. How we shouldn’t be positing these people as ‘broken’ because their brains work slightly different, but because our society isn’t structured in a way to allow them to contribute in a way that works best for them.
That was messy, it did open my eyes to how much capitalism permeates our society though.
Wasn’t there a reddit community made around that time this happened? I’m probably misinformed though. May you please link me where i may learn about this? Thanks
Not sure about reddit. I was talking about how there used to be an antipsychiatry community on this website. It had to be banned because the creator would post a lot of pseudoscience.
Ohhh ok.
A lot of the early history of psychiatry was explicitly about controlling “deviants” rather than actually helping them integrate. Turns out bipolar people don’t need any more of those dubious meds than they actually need the financial security that Kanye West has to not go homeless due to having a crisis. I wince whenever I hear any lib propping up pop positive psychology nonsense such as “gratitude journals” for people who have way more reasons to be angry than to be grateful. But I’ve ran into some pretty “woke” professionals who actually fully endorsed tackling social issues and focused mostly on dealing with (self-)harmful personal behaviours. Stuff like blaming oneself for external issues or how to deal with irrational stuff like paranoid thoughts. They usually were from the CBT branch, though I’ve also met some trashy CBT professionals so YMMV. I guess it helps in my country that psychology is usually taught more alongside history and philosophy rather than medicine.
I also have serious issues with anything related to capitalist medicine because no one in their right mind would think that the best solution for vulnerable/disabled/sick/injured people should be to profit from them. Not only it is immoral but professionals then have to fight against their own class interests of income if they want those people to be able to leave the care eventually. Not to mention that so long as private healthcare exists, it will try its darnest to privatise or discredit public healthcare, and there should be no competition on the business of saving lives. This is why the pearl clutching over some imaginary plan from Sanders to abolish insurance in the USA actually made his campaign look even better than it was.
Edit: It’s possible you have like-minded comrades even in your classes. Organisation is always the first step!
Ohh! I posted this because one of my batchmates quoted a meme post of a client complaining he doesn’t want to work and to die (with the therapist asking them to accept it), by saying the OP of the post is bigoted??? and talks about how the biopsychosocial model is the most effective right now, etc. Like, it doesn’t matter if IT IS BEING REGARDED AS THE MOST EFFECTIVE right now, because it still doesn’t mean its doing the job. As someone else above pointed out, humanistic Rogerian psychotherapy, postive psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, existential, CBT, no other school as it is right now will be able to effectively claim to FIX a person’s material reality while actively NOT accepting the exploitation of the people
Like, it doesn’t matter if IT IS BEING REGARDED AS THE MOST EFFECTIVE right now, because it still doesn’t mean its doing the job.
Killing all humans will reduce mental illness to zero, checkmate communists.
I agree that “fixing” people needs the social aspect and CBT by itself hasn’t helped me much, but my current therapist is both CBT and a Marxist so it helps. I hope some Marxist therapy branch catches on eventually. As for psychiatry, at the very least the entire process should be free. No person should have to choose between food and meds that may mess with your appetite.
I remember someone once posted a list of all the human rights abuses the APA (American Psychological Association) has engaged in? I remember it definitely included claiming both homosexuality and gender dysphoria as mental diseases requiring involuntary “treatment,” but I think there were several other ones too.
Anyone know what I’m talking about and have a link?
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Relevant video by Dr Jamies Davies on the DSM being written by consensus and not evidence https://youtu.be/6JPgpasgueQ
The Upstream podcast touches on this with this week’s episode about Health Communism. I’m still being astonished by how much Capitalism influences every aspect of our lives. It’s like, I think I know, then something shows me I don’t.
This is why sociology is so important and needs to be recognized as an integral part of education and how we understand the world. It goes without saying that we live in an excessively individualistic culture, and that causes us to be in denial about how much these larger social factors affect us. We are all trained to see ourselves as singular instead of part of communities, populations, groups, and to see institutions as singular entities instead of parts of larger structures that make up a greater, overarching system that’s connected to and that perpetuates the issues we face as individuals.
Unfortunately sociology is pretty much the definition of what conservatives are fighting against in education and the “culture wars”: Understanding the experiences of oppressed groups and finding solutions to probems on a social level. So of course it’s not well respected or well known. I have to explain my major every time I bring it up and someone assumes I’m a social worker. The more we understand how our society works, the better equipped we will be to change it.
Have you met any conservative sociologists? I can’t imagine studying sociology and coming out the other side with a hierarchical mindset.
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If you want an explicit example of psychotherapy being used to breed conservatism, you should look at Therapeutic Fascism: re-educating Communists in Nazi-occupied Serbia, 1942–44. The author released a lengthier edition titled Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the Violence of the Nazi New Order in Yugoslavia, and the similar Psychoanalysis and Politics: Histories of Psychoanalysis Under Conditions of Restricted Political Freedom looks quite promising, but I have not yet read either.
My penultimate therapist (and probably my ultimate one as well) was a social democrat whom I distinctly remember admitting to me that he couldn’t offer me a miracle, but I always left his sessions feeling better and we agreed far more than we disagreed. He was the best therapist that I had, but after a year or so he had to retire and I switched to another therapist, who wasn’t as memorable but she still helped me most of the time. Then she had to quit, too, only in her case it was because the institution wasn’t paying her enough. I could have continued seeing therapists, but I decided not to.
My last two therapists were my best, and they certainly helped me, but even so I have to be honest and say that, much like my medication, what they provided was only some temporary relief; something to dull the severity of my symptoms, not address the causes. I still have to deal with traumatic memories and other intrusive thoughts, sometimes to the point where it almost feels like there is a war going on in my head, and no matter how peaceful I seem on the outside, I am hurting on the inside nearly every day.
One of the reasons that I want us to abolish capitalism is that I want somebody to publish a cure for depression, something unlikely to reach the market since that would result in fewer returning customers for the pharmaceutical industry. I have been suffering for nearly a couple dozen years now and I can only think of one way to finally stop it. You can imagine what that way is.
that would result in fewer returning customers for the pharmaceutical industry
If I can add, psychology seems to have become an industry as well. I am Canadian and technically have access to free healthcare. However, like in many other countries, the resources are so overwhelmed that many are unable to access any form of treatment because they cannot afford private care. I have always been told medication alone cannot help and you should always do some form of therapy if you are taking it.
If we had a cure for depression and other mental health illnesses, I think psychologists would also try to stop it from reaching the markets. Being in the same situation as you as a long time sufferer with little options to stop it, I do hope that either something will change soon or that at least, for those after us.
This is not shocking considering that both professions are easily 20 years behind the rest of the other medicine fields.
EDIT: In Nazi Germany, some 250,000 people were murdered on the basis of eugenic psychiatry that became popular in America and resulted in the sterilization of about 60,000 people. Eugenics in Nazi Germany was heavily influenced by the movement in America and many psychiatrists who continue to have major influence over the field were supporters, like Adolf Meyer.
Source?
I conflated some things. In Nazi Germany, some 250,000 people were murdered on the basis of eugenic psychiatry that became popular in America and resulted in the sterilization of about 60,000 people. Eugenics in Nazi Germany was heavily influenced by the movement in America and many psychiatrists who continue to have major influence over the field were supporters, like Adolf Meyer. I could have sworn I read an article more directly drawing comparisons between the eugenic psychology in early 20th century America to the practice today, but I can’t find it so I can’t claim a super strong connection there.
That is blatantly untrue. Psychiatry was founded in the US before even the Civil War in 1844, when the American Psychiatric Association was set up in Philadelphia where they set up the first American psychiatric hospital and set up some of the world first effective lithium treatments for depression.
Yes psychiatry had horrible fall throughs and it was used for evil, but as a medical practice it was generally an institution for good.
You’re right, I got some things conflated. Nazi Germany were actually using eugenic ideas pushed first by psychiatry in the US in the early 20th century to mass murder up to 250,000 people. Many of the most prominent psychiatrists in the early 20th century in the US were eugenicists, some who have major legacies to this day. I remember reading something previously that linked these eugenicist ideas to modern psychiatry but I can’t find it. I’ll edit my post.
Richard Wolff’s partner, Harriet Fraad is a psychiatrist and has similar ideas and made a podcast with a therapist, Max Golding, called It’s Not Just in Your Head. Libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote extensively on the limitations of his field.
Historically psychiatry has been used to control runaway slaves, suffering drapetomia. Complaining women had hysteria. You are gay? That was diagnosable.
Racial bias in psych treatment is well documented, with people of color more likely to be perceived as aggressive and a threat to others than white presenting people with similar behaviour.
Psychiatry is most often practiced on an individual and fails to take into account the societal problems around an individual. If you’re boss abuses you or the system as a whole alienates you there is little a psych can do.
I used to consider myself antipsychiatry, I have personally had negative experiences with involuntary psychiatric “treatment”
While going through an anarchist phase there was seemingly little contradiction between my antipsych and ideological beliefs - it’s just another unjust hierarchy. You can only be diagnosed if your function within this capitalist system is impaired.
As I embraced Marxist-Leninist ideas, contradictions became evident. Liberalism is an infantile disorder, the psychopathic accumulation of wealth by the richest endangers our survival as a species, the insecurities of those who hold on to the patriarchy and supremacist ideas should be remedied, one way or another.
I defended the right of self identifying neurodiverse people to reclaim labels such as autism while maintaining their criticism of psychiatry as it was inflicted upon themselves - within antipsychiatry communities such sentiment was not welcome. I was subjected to antisemitic attacks for refusing to endorse the labelling of psychiatry as a “holocaust”
I have much sympathy for the people who call themselves antipsychiatry, most of them have suffered immensely and they have legitimate criticisms of the field. But I can’t call them comrades, for most - their understanding of the systems of oppression is too narrow - their hatred of psychiatry is bordering on reactionary. Seeing well meaning people with legitimate criticism of psychiatry, who were rejected by such communities for daring to identify as autistic or ND was quite disappointing. Seeing entirely antimedical communities come into being from antipsychiatry ones, even worse.
I still have serious doubts about the long term efficacy of psychiatric treatment but I’m willing to accept that there maybe some situations where it is appropriate. I am an administrator on a discord server that describes itself as psych abolitionist and is mostly populated by anarchists that I helped start while I still considered myself antipsych that at least doesn’t allow for bigotry or hate speech, though I am not very comfortable with my role there and would prefer to just be a visitor - I don’t enforce my ideology there and try not to be heavy handed with the rules, I’ve asked to have my admin/mod powers removed but my anarchist friend, who created the server, lives in a different timezone, isn’t very active online and seems to have faith in my ability to be fair.
This feels a bit sweeping and grandiose. I feel like this is targeted more towards psychiatry and therapy for depression or anxiety, as on the other hand I utilize psychiatry for another mental illness, and psychiatry and modern medicine has directly saved my life and allowed me to live life as a normal person. This applies to tens of millions worldwide who share my condition. Psychiatry has given us a second lease on life, something that would have been impossible nearly 70 years ago.
Sigh, here we go again…
There is certain truth that psychiatric treatment by itself in many occasions will not be as powerful to change a patient’s life for the better as it would be if this one was accompanied by a change of their life conditions: poor people suffer from more mental health issues than the rich, after all.
But what psychiatry does is more than just treat depression, or to be more specific, depression precipitated by poverty and capitalist exploitation. OCD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorders… The list goes on, and the role that psychiatry plays nowadays in their treatment is not one of enforcer and normalizer of capitalism, as some (banned) people here in lemmygrad are known for believing.
As a certified Bipolar, I still think this is a worthwhile conversation to have.
There can be aspects of a field of study that are worth preserving while others exist that are worth less than nothing.
My medication journey began with my involuntary instutionalization as a child because I told my mom I was so depressed I wanted to drop out of school. I was sent to a juvenile detention center (selling itself as a “behavioral health facility”). It was hell. I was a suicidal, depressed teenager now surrounded by other kids ranging from runaways to pyromaniacs to sex offenders to those with violent tendencies.
It took 7 years to get my meds where they needed to be for me to function, and another 2 to find a med combination I can be content with. For those 7 years, I took prozac. I do not speak lightly when I say those years fried the hell out of my brain, and it’s taken long, tumultuous years of work to try to unfry it.
I am glad for my meds. I attend pay-what-you-can therapy. The end goal of all of it, though, despite my intentions, despite my healthcare providers’ intentions – at a systemic level – is to transform me and other useless eaters into productive members of society, not fully actualized people.
Oh, and to sell meds at 2000x the price it costs to manufacture them, of course.
Tangential addendum: the DSM sucks and has a foundation rooted in oppression and repression of LGBT people and political dissidents. and the overly prescriptive nature of western psychiatry (as opposed to a more holistic view of mental health) is maintained by the effort of pharmaceutical and healthcare profiteers through captured agencies like the American Psychiatric Association.
I highly recommend the website https://www.madinamerica.com/ for an alternative view - what they call critical psychiatry.
Oh, and to sell meds at 2000x the price it costs to manufacture them, of course.
I was horribly misdiagnosed as bipolar a while back and while the meds had barely any effect on me (positive or negative) their huge costs coupled for no help at all made my mental health worse than it was beforehand. I suspect that the diagnosis was so random for my conditions because it was the most medicable condition the “professional” could find to keep me coming back for more.
I have no issue with psychiatry as a field in the abstract though, just the health profiteering that passes as psychiatry in capitalism. That link there is interesting, thanks!
Oh well, Lemmygrad has taken a like not to notify me of replies to my posts so I missed yours until now.
I am not American, and thus I usually refuse to center the focus of conversations into the shape that capitalism particularly takes in the USA for its population and instead attempt to address capitalism globally, thus I will not go on into the form of healthcare that the US has in particular.
That being said: it is indeed a conversation to have. But I will add: it is a conversation to have with an important amount of investigation and research done previously. Issues regarding healthcare and the ways it can improve can, without a relative amount of education, easily deviate into anti-science discourse, with people identifying correctly the grasp that capitalism has into healthcare and its transformation to serve its own interests but, as a solution, decidint to proclaim instead psychiatry to be a “false science” that exists purely to control the population and generate profit with it.
Science is not immune to the material conditions of the society it exists in. Biology, and more specifically genetics was used once to legitimize colonialism because that was the world it existed in, but I doubt anyone with half a brain would consider that the world would be doing better if biology as a science did not exist due to its history. The same happens in medicine, including the field of mental health, with events such as the ones that the DSM has seen and that you have pointed out.
The point I am trying to make is simple: the existance of psychiatry under capitalism, despite its many faults, is still more benefitial to proletarians than it would be its non-existance. Psychiatry in particular and science in general must be seen not as willing servants of capital, but as its hostages.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Has anyone here read the book “Capitalist Realism”? My memory’s a bit dull but I remember in one chapter Fisher was writing about the connection between advanced capitalist society and mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. He was writing about how bourgeois society seeks to “depoliticize” mental health, and dismiss things like depression as individual problems that do not stem from how society is organized.
