Psychotherapy and psychiatry in a capitalistic system effectively exists to reinforce the status of the bourgeoisie rather than to abolish it
Psychotherapy and psychiatry in a capitalistic system effectively exists to reinforce the status of the bourgeoisie rather than to abolish it
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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 with 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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
i'm not totally sure about that in every case...as someone who uses antidepressants i don't think i've being "indoctrined" to support status quo, but the medication makes me feel less doomerish
As somebody who didn't do all of the hard work that you did, can you give me a starting place with Marxism and how it applies to psychology? I'm interested but I don't know where to start.
Vygotsky could be helpful: https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/
There's been loads written about him. Just be careful as he's often very liberalised.
Edit: there's also MIM Theory Volume 9. Scroll down, here, for a PDF: https://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/
This is made to be hard work because its so internalized in us that its just the way it is, that the system makes it as hard as possible for the people to be class conscious. I appreciate it, but I'm still learning. And so are you. As long as we are actively questioning the reality around us, nobody is more or less equal
I think this should be bookmarked by now, but marxists archive has a section on marxist psychology in general, and there is another section on education, which is also relevant, hope it helps comrade.
What do you know/think about dialectical behavioural therapy? Is there any good in it?
Edit: speak of the devil, there's a new book out on politics and mental health: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745346717/mad-world/
Edit 2: and another one coming out soon, on neurodiversity and capitalism: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745348667/empire-of-normality/
Psychiatry is not the same as Psychotherapy.
Different approaches of Psychotherapy are not the same.
This post is just showing your lack of knowelage and understanding of them.
I do agree most of them (especially short ones) are bs and tool of capitalism, but some are individualistic and tailored to human. Problem is they are also anticomunist, since they values individual and not community.
I am talking about psychoanalysis. All others are waist of time..
I browse by "all" and have lost track of how many subs I've blocked from this instance...
Why do you all keep making a bunch of subs to say the same things over and over?
Idk with therapist you are going but my never suggested anything remote to "just accept reality". Also this kind of generalizationis stupid because each professional is different, but also because each illness have a different root cause. Yes a lot of depression these days come as a sub product of capitalism, and the ones that don't? This kind of generalization just make everyone less propense to seek help and is actually dangerous baseless and similar to anti-vax movement.
similar to anti-vax movement? What? Psychology (and to extension medicine) is so corrupt because of how bourgeoisie it is, with poor people not being able to get any sort of healthcare (mental health related or not). People who live minimum wage, paycheck to paycheck are more than disillussioned with what the current state is. My argument, towards the mental health system is that it does not have a Marxist perspective and only a Marxist informed therapist can effectively know what to say to people who don't know what to do.
Each illness has a different root cause, and its not just depression that these days is a sub product of capitalism. I want to know what are the other root causes you are mentioning?
Schizophrenia and bipolar patients are told to swallow pill after pill which does nothing but keep their sanity at bay. Is their autonomy not essential to their well being? And behold, if pills cannot "control" them, what happens? They are admitted to mental asylums, rehab centres, which ALSO profits off of it.
What about PTSD? Is PTSD not a sub product of capitalism, because, patriarchy which, is one of the many gruesome ways capitalism manifests itself, abuses women and somehow (not surprisingly) the people who have connections get away with it. Capitalism controls what they deem to be quality education and what isn't. If you don't provide proper sex education to someone and they somehow sexually assault someone, its the fault of the system as a whole. If that person also doesn't get punished for it, it is also the fault of the system.
I remember a quote of a revolutionary who said something along the lines of all proletariat thinkers being depressed because that is what is needed for people to realize their worth.
I recognize saying that therapists just tell you to accept reality is a faulty way of thinking and by no means can it be a generalization. But is it really working? Is psychotherapy doing its job?