hijacked

on this morning's headline

This morning’s headline in the Guardian (“Wes Streeting orders review of mental health diagnoses as benefit claims soar”) demonstrates fully how power hijacks radical arguments in an attempt to contain them. The subtitle of the article is “Health secretary has asked experts to investigate whether normal feelings have become ‘over-pathologised’”

One of the arguments in the mad movement is the need to end the culture of over-pathologisation or even to end the culture of pathologisation altogether (which is my own position.) In my view, pathologisation entirely misses the point by individualising the human suffering that madness embodies. When framing mental suffering as a matter of biological health, we wash our hands of the social injustices that contextualise this suffering.

There are three problems in these headlines, which illustrate power at work to preserve itself.

The first is that the review of pathologisation culture is linked to reform of the benefits system. The motivation of the government is not to end human suffering, but rather to cut the benefits bill.

The second is that the review will be in the hands of ‘experts’ eg the very professionals whose ‘salaries depend on their not understanding.’ Psychiatry exists as an arm of the state, enforcing the narrow social norms permitted by neo-liberal capitalism.

The third lies in the use of the word ‘normal’ - again, social norms as a tool of oppression. Who defines what is a ‘normal feeling’? And why is it being used as a criterion at all?

In these three problematic elements of the headlines, we can see how the challenge to pathologisation set by the mad movement has been hijacked by power, and twisted into an attempt to meet its own ends.

Having said all this, I still welcome the review.

The way I envision society’s approach to madness is that it has laid a great slab of cement (diagnosis, medication, coercion and containment) over a rich, organic soil (the many-layered, intersectional experience and expression of non-normative thought and behaviour). The cement is cracking apart from its own weight and hubris, and we in the mad movement are the weeds that are pushing our way through the cracks. This forthcoming mental health review represents a new crack in the cement, and it is an opportunity to push up, strengthen our roots and reach up through the slab, out into the open air.

Power will always try to hijack those attempts to check it and challenge it, but control is a fruitless exercise in a dynamic, mad world.

Photo by Amanda Forrest on Unsplash