(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Journalist Micha Frazer-Carroll has collected many British discussions of mental health, from the origins of asylums to anti-psychiatric movements, in Mad World. The Politics of Mental Health.
It may not seem immediately obvious what asylum patients, disabled people and queer people have in common. However, Frazer-Carroll takes us on a path where we get to see the big picture. There is no such thing as 'healthy', 'normal' or 'sick', there is only history and the political forces that shape our laws, prejudices and hopes.
Extensively documented and in a very easy-to-read manner – a quality I wish academics possessed more often – the author first explains to us the origins and current state of mental health in London, at the heart of the empire. From trans women dying while waiting for gender confirmation treatment, to people being incarcerated in hospital under the Mental Health Act, the rigor of social care in the UK is quite disheartening.
Once highly centralized nation-states are sucked into neoliberal chaos, there seems to be no way out, but there is always hope, and crazy people are at the heart of it.
Writing about the 'materiality' of madness/mental illness can mean different things. When I read the book, I expected to find a series of statistics and numbers that proved that treating crazy people as inferior might not be the best approach. How successful and productive had been a variety of psychological techniques and socially permissive measures?
However, this book is not a mental health book, but more of an introductory manual to anti-capitalism…
Nothing to cure
Psychiatry has a monopoly on the truth. Like all other scientific disciplines subject to capitalism and financed by it, it serves the interests of the state and claims to hold certain neutral, apolitical truths about our bodies and minds.
Contrary to most Western thinking, most cultures in the pre-capitalist world found no conflicting dualism between body and mind, but perceived them as one entity, meaning that there are no barriers between what affects us physically and mentally/spiritually, nor between what affects a person and their loved ones.
Somehow Frazer-Carroll, who is herself involved in the discussions and brainstorming of the social movements that try to defy medical truth, manages to approach the sensibility of the reader. If you haven't been diagnosed before, you'll probably start to empathize with those who have.
There was a time when homosexuality was also madness.
From patient associations and wheelchair train blockades to queer protests and artistic projects, this book shows how people in Britain have resisted the power of diagnosis and continue to challenge a world that dictates there is only one way to be healthy and human.
There was a time when homosexuality was also madness. Being lesbian, gay or transgender is still a crime in dozens of countries, and in my own country, Mexico, there are still conversion therapy centers, despite international laws. I myself have participated in demonstrations where far-right Catholics threatened to send us to these places. The fight for queer liberation many times included fighting against a psychiatric system that only dictated what was best for creating good workers: Anything that wasn't a functioning body and able and willing to fit into a heteronormative family was considered sick , defective and had to be locked up, abused, crushed, cured or thrown out.
Whether it's schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, homosexuality, transsexuality, blindness or fibromyalgia, our healing and recovery cannot be to become productive, hide trauma and blame ourselves – but rather to claim a world where we can truly thrive and live a fulfilling life.
Illness is incapacity for work
Mental illness is referred to as something we are, something born inside us, something that our body against our knowledge and will has decided to develop. This approach to illness largely individualizes a more complex relational problem. If we cannot see our interconnectedness, the individualism of capitalism will make us believe that there is no 'us', only 'I'. The second feature of capitalism is the sacred private property. Therefore, illness is also our ownership, something we have, something we are responsible for.
Frazer-Carroll takes a consistent approach to work as a key factor in defining insanity: "Being exploitable is part of the definition of sanity," she argues. Furthermore, she shows how this mandate is deeply linked to systems of oppression that are based on gender and race. Fatphobia, racism and prejudice against the disabled play an important role in the design and criminalization of the insane or mentally ill.
"Being exploitable is part of the definition of sanity."
With psychiatric diagnoses, attempts have been made to categorize and frame all features of the human body and mind. The author thoroughly deconstructs the apparent contradictions between nature and culture and exemplifies that the biological and the social are an artificial opposition.
Think again
In the same way, functional variation is a relational phenomenon, not something you can have and be deprived of. The author's approach to functional variation, from covid survivors to the elderly, from short- and long-sighted to neurotics, lays the political foundations for a struggle that ultimately concerns us all. Here lies the need to reshape the way we construct our world.
A strength of the book is not only the good research, so that the reader can easily dive deeper into the topic by looking at the endnotes, but also that Frazer-Carroll herself shows how involved she is. In large parts of the book, she manages to take us through her own point of view and into the conversations she has had with activists and friends. Frazer-Carroll skilfully mixes ethnographic and archival material.
"Suffering follows the political contours of our lives," she says. Finally, I would like to say that another advantage of this book is that it does not attempt to define what mental illness is, or how it should be treated. Rather, the author is open about the fact that treatment can work for some. Medicines – like vaccines – can make us survive, but refusing to take them can also help us grow and resist death. There is no definitive recipe; what worked for us yesterday will not necessarily be the best today. As the author points out: "It is up to us to give meaning to our own experiences, to find new ways of orienting ourselves towards knowledge."
If to be unable to adapt to a murderous system, to refuse to bow your head and submit to fate means to be mad, then let madness be the force that guides us towards a liberated future.
Translated from English by the editor.
