What are the important sources of critiques on western biomedical models of psychiatry?
- people who have experienced it
- drawing attention to systemic and structural violence in individualized biomedicine
Why is it important the list of self identifiers grow?
reflect resistance to use system imposed diagnostic categories as labels
What is wrong with system imposed diagnostic categories as labels
homogenous and essentializing (characterize a trait as intrinsic to someone)
What do pathology oriented identity categories do?
rationalize violence and restrict people’s freedoms and rights
What is sanism
irrational prejudice against those with mental illness
What are 2 features that highlight commonalities in historical and social contexts?
colonialism and imperialism
- racism, sanism, eugenics, ableism
What are many scholars and activists now doing to build alliances upon solidarity of marginalized groups?
focusing on common experiences of exclusion and oppression
What is the model that remains dominant in psychiatry? why?
western psychiatric models
- *an ongoing drive to find a material (somatic) basis for mental illness
What is ontology?
Our understanding of what mental illness is, what counts as mental disease/disorder/illness
What is Epistemology?
What we know and how we know what we know
What is lived experience
unique, person-entered knowledge, insight, and expertise
What influences what ideas are ‘correct’ about mental illness?
cultural concepts or power structures
What did Hippocrates do
- argued that madness had biological cause, previously was thought that madness was spiritually caused
- imbalance of four humours
- *influenced treatment of madness into 19th century
What are the four humours
- black bile
- yellow bile
- blood
- phlegm
What happened as the church and Christianity gained power in Europe
spiritual explanations for madness more dominant
- *to control madness
- power to confine
What were a growing industry related to madness
for profit madhouses, asylums, prisons
- developed in response to enlightenment (knowledge from reason, scientific treatment)
What is pathology and when did it arise
19th century
- physicians connect physical changes with illness
- **can rarely see visible structural abnormalities in mental illness… biological model = dominant
What is the biomedical model considered
a model of reality and for reality
- aura of factuality
How is the biomedical model a model of reality and for reality
- a worldview… not proven
How is psychiatry like a cultural system
expresses a view of world and provides guidance on how to act or function
What are critiques of biomedical model
- a myth?
- means of social control and surveillance
- inequities in power and control
- colonialism
What is anti psychiatry?
- challenge mainstream psychiatry
- sees diagnosing and labelling as form of social and political control
- mental illness = political issue
- context and dynamics shape understandings and responses
- value in critiques
How does mainstream psychiatry respond to anti psychiatry
- defensive
- anti-psychiatry” used to dismiss and trivialize critiques, while marginalizing critics
What is the critical psychiatry movement
- analyze social role and ideas of profession
- avoid polarization
- more holistic construct than just the brain
- mainstream is part of problem by objectifying and reducing problems to brain
