If You're Looking For Further Antipsych Readings, I Heavily Recommend Bruce Cohen's Psychiatric Hegemony:

if you're looking for further antipsych readings, i heavily recommend bruce cohen's psychiatric hegemony: a marxist theory of mental illness.

it would be one of the published academic books on the topic of psychiatry i would have the least amount of caveats for - together with anne harrington's mind fixers: psychiatry's troubled search for the biology of mental illness.

if you are already convinced that psychiatry, together with other sciences, evolved alongside capitalist development to serve bourgeois interests, ensure social control and legitimize the hegemonic world order - and that no amount of intradisciplinary reform can change this, short of total abolition - then you will likely not be learning much from this book. it does however lay the arguments very clearly, together with concise, clearly explained marxist theory about labor. it then goes on to tie psychiatry with other hegemonic structures - the family, most notably.

interestingly enough, it manages to completely avoid two of the most common pitfalls of this kind of text: it never places the issue with the use of drugs themselves, but with forced medication and lack of available information - and it never blames capitalism itself for the coercive and punishing character of psychiatry, inventing a precapitalistic mythical past where crazy people were fine.

a solid recommendation if you are trying to give an introduction to antipsychiatry concepts to someone!

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hensteeths

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hensteeths

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hensteeths

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hensteeths

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hensteeths

2 months ago

that doesn't invalidate the statement. theoretical analysis of oppression is often necessarily simplifying because, as you pointed out, life is infinitely complicated, and sometimes you have to gloss over potential complicating factors if you want a political statement more specific than "oppressed people are oppressed by their oppressors". and once you've identified a generalized pattern of oppression, say, men oppressing women, you can begin to interrogate how that is impacted (intersected even) by other patterns of oppression