03 Apr The Challenge for Psychiatry, Psychology and Therapy—Bringing Critique and Action Together
For the past few weeks I’ve been leading, with Robert Whitaker, an online conversation entitled, “Mad in America: Where do we go from here?” The course is created through an asynchronous group email and real-time Zoom calls where people share experiences, respond to readings and videos, and pose questions and responses. There’s fifty or so people enrolled and varying levels of participation. It’s a great mixture of people—many work in mental health as social workers, nurses, psychiatrists, mental health counselors and therapists; some identify as survivors and are advocates and activists for alternatives to medicalized treatment; others practice one or another of the creative arts in their work with healing and/or social justice work with groups and communities. The majority live in the US, with people from Canada, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Serbia, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey and the UK making up the rest.
There’s much to say about the rich conversations we’ve been having on a variety of topics. What’s most striking to me the past few days is how eagerness to “move beyond critique” sits right beside deep pessimism at ever doing so. “What will it take to succeed in changing the script of and for human emotional suffering?”—that’s the question on the table.
As with all efforts to challenge and change vast social institutions like this one (at least those I know well which, in addition to mental health and psychology, are education and electoral politics), the practice-theory question gets raised. In the “Mad in America” course it’s taking the form of critique and action. Do you have to critique the existing paradigm before you create a new paradigm (or an approach that is non-paradigmatic)? Does the critique of the medical model of mental illness have to come first? And then mass social action can follow? Or can you skip the paradigm question and take action by creating new kinds of practices? Will the critique follow? Does it need to? What if these new practices could be supported and promoted? Could that lead to mass action and/or contribute is some way to a loosening of the medical model?
I’m an activist-scholar-practitioner which is, perhaps, how come I believe that there doesn’t have to be an issue in which comes first. Theory and practice, critique and action, can be one unified cultural-social activity. New practices of understanding the variety of human emotional experiences derive from new practices of relating to them—ask anyone who has been involved. I think new practices are themselves a powerful form of critique. The challenge is how to engage masses of people in participating in and creating practices that—by virtue of being of direct benefit to those involved and by virtue of generating more choices for others—are in their very activity critical. That’s a tall order and, while we don’t know how to do it, we can try!
Thanks to the East Side Institute, I have the opportunity to be among people who care about these issues and want to create where we can go from here.
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