AN INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE FOR DEMOCRATIC PSYCHIATRY,
PSYCHOLOGY, EDUCATION AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
INCORPORATING THE NEWSLETTER OF PSYCHOLOGY, POLITICS,
RESISTANCE
Asylum Collective and our friends and supporters in the Critical Psychiatry Network, Hearing Voices Network and Psychology Politics Resistance will be meeting to discuss alternatives to pathological labels of ‘mental illness’. The event on 14-15 coincides with celebration of World Hearing Voices Day.
The Asylum conference sessions are incorporated into one overall programme for the Normalcy conference, and we have tagged the Asylum sessions in that programme. The abstracts are all together in the Normalcy conference abstracts booklet. If you are giving a paper at the Asylum conference and you have not registered at the ‘eventbrite’ website, don’t worry, just come along. We have juggled the times of the papers now to take account of the days and times that people could make, and we cannot move things again now. You will see that time is tight and all possible slots are now full. If you are down to give a paper and you cannot come along, please let me know soon as possible at conference@asylumonline.net If you are not giving a paper and have not registered, then apologies, we are now full up, the joint conference is packed out. There will be bookstalls and display things alongside the conference sessions as well as time out space. The 250 people registered will put pressure on our cafeteria, so it may be a very good idea to bring your own sandwiches for lunch. We won’t be printing out copies of the programme or abstracts. This is a free conference, and we don’t have the resources to do that.
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Asylum: The Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry first appeared in 1986 and since then it has been a leading force in a radical movement that brings together patients and survivors with professionals willing to break from mainstream psychiatric practice. The democratic psychiatry movement poses questions for those who too often tries to solve problems of ‘mental health’ by simply calling for more resources, more hospitals, as if more drugs and locked wards were a solution. There are many more fundamental problems with psychiatry that Asylum has addressed in different ways since the 1980s.
Psychiatry is organised around a medical model of distress, and its bible of diagnostic categories, the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM) is now in its fourth edition. The number of categories expand with each revision of the DSM, and it is now driven by the pharmaceutical companies who are into the game of discovering what their drugs will stop and then convincing their clients – that is, the psychiatrists and hard-pressed general practitioners – that these are ‘disorders’ for which their brand medicine is the solution. The sales of the DSM pay the mortgage on the headquarters of the American Psychiatric Association, but the connections between mental illness and capital accumulation run much deeper than that.
Alienation and exploitation are the stuff of life for obedient workers and the unemployed, but when those who suffer break under the strain the label ‘mental illness’ gives another cruel twist to their fate. Every dimension of oppression is tangled at some point in psychiatry, ranging from three-fold over-representation of black and ethnic minority people detained under the Mental Health Act, to the forced electroshock given to elderly women, to the Ritalin medication given to thousands of children who are seen as ‘hyperactive’. Capitalism does not cause every mental health problem, but psychiatry is for sure a practice that aims to adapt people to capitalism rather than offer a genuine place of ‘asylum’ as space of refuge.
The phrase ‘democratic psychiatry’ signals a historic debt to the Italian reforms based mainly in Trieste which culminated in 1978 in Law 180 which called for the closure of the mental hospitals. These hospitals were little more than places of confinement with atrocious conditions, and the Democratic Psychiatry movement took steps to implement this closure, with involvement of groups like Democrazia Proletaria and some local Communist Party activists. This also meant mobilising against the fascist trades unions that many of the hospital nurses were members of, and it also meant building democratically-run mental health centres that would provide support rather than simply throwing patients back into the clutches of their families. The movement failed but, as with the encirclement and crushing of other revolutions, we need to understand why it failed and what it still shows us today.
In Britain the democratic psychiatry movement had to engage with the so-called ‘anti-psychiatrists’, and there was a long interview with R. D. Laing in the first issue of Asylum, but this meant tackling the romanticising of ‘madness’ that was popular among some radicals at the time. It was clear right from the start that simply flipping over from pathological labels like schizophrenia to celebrating it as if it was some kind of liberation just did not take suffering seriously. This is why Asylum over the years has been a focus-point for groups of activists inside the system searching for better ways out, and why many of those who had already been organised in the Mental Patients Union from the early 1970s became involved. Groupings like Survivors Speak Out in the 1980s and then in the 1990s the National Self-Harm Network influenced by feminism found a voice in Asylum, as did ‘Mad Pride’ and the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) which brought together those labelled as subject to treatment because the DSM treats the hearing of voices as a first-rank symptom of schizophrenia. One of the grotesque features of psychiatry is that it trains doctors from around the world who buy into Western notions of what is normal and then diagnose as pathological experiences like hearing the voices of spirits that are unproblematic in many other cultures.
One of the paradoxes of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ and democratic psychiatry movements is that they have been led by those with privilege and power, by psychiatrists, whether that has been Franco Basaglia in Trieste, Ronnie Laing in Britain, Marius Romme in Maastricht as inspiration for the HVN, or Alec Jenner as a founding editor of Asylum magazine in Sheffield. But this leadership, by men, white men, has then given way to self-organisation of the oppressed in the field of mental health to argue about whether this suffering should be taken seriously as ‘illness’ with a demand for more resources, whether this suffering is symptomatic of life under capitalism, and what the place of this struggle with other social movements could be.
One of the many ‘re-launch’ events for Asylum over the years, in 2001 in Manchester, connected ‘asylum’ in mental health with the question of asylum and immigration, and this was also occasion for sharp debates between activists who had been involved in different left groups. A few years later we held a large conference, again in Manchester (which for most of its history has been the centre of the Hearing Voices Movement in the UK) for the newly emerging ‘Paranoia Network’. One thing those who are labelled paranoid are right about is that most people now are not suspicious enough about the activities of the state. Those who are at the sharp end of the psychiatric system know very well what it is to be observed and controlled.
The spring 2010 re-launch special issue was on the theme of paranoia, with articles on paranoia and psychiatry and politics, on experiences of madness and on the war on terror. There have since been special issues on medication and on ‘Mad Pride’.
