The abolition of psychiatry does not mean that no one is allowed to identify with psychiatric diagnoses that they feel serve them, or that no one is allowed to continue taking psychiatric medications they find effective². It does mean, however, that the notion of ‘mental illness’ was invented to pathologize logical responses to the stress and trauma that are omnipresent in a world brutalized by colonialism and capitalism. Psychiatry has been described as a “medicalized colonizing of lands, peoples, bodies, and minds.” A notable example of psychiatry’s colonial intentions was the diagnosis of ‘drapetomania’: the mental ‘disease’ that explained why enslaved Black people in the Antebellum south ran away from their death camps (the ‘treatment’ for which was to treat them more ‘like children’). As China Mills states in Globalizing Mental Health, “distress caused by socio-economic conditions (and often neoliberal economic reforms) comes to be rearticulated as ‘mental illness’, treatable using techniques that draw upon similar rationales to those that led to distress initially.”
Psych abolition means that the intended and realized outcome of the advent of ‘mental illness’ as a signifier is to make folks feel like they will never get better and that their distress is inherent to their brain chemistry rather than a reaction to external stimuli. This logic is essentially victim-blaming and shifts responsibility away from cycles of violence that create the conditions for psychological suffering — not to mention that the “chemical imbalance” theory has been numerously debunked. It means, too, that psychiatry was built with a core desire to dehumanize, drug, and discard those whose behavior and ways of being diverged from the status quo. This status quo was and is white, patriarchal, and absolutely enamored with respectability and compliance with the state’s self-serving notions of “normalcy.”
Many Psychiatric Survivors have made incredible strides in pursuit of justice, reform, and sometimes abolition. But the current nature of psych wards, which, for the most part, have remained violent, degrading prisons at which a majority of ex-inmates assert that they were not helped and were further traumatized, arguably indicates that the asylum never died. Why? Because it was never supposed to. Psychiatry IS the ethic of the asylum, and it will not fall until Psychiatry falls.
Stella Akua Mensah and Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, Abolition Must Include Psychiatry
