I’ve just read this article by Prof Linda Gask, a psychiatrist who suffers from depression. Her argument is that critiques of the framework of ‘depression as illness’ are contributing to the DWP’s agenda to reduce the welfare bill.
My concern is that Prof Gask - and DWP for that matter - are conflating the critique of the biomedical model with the desire to eradicate support. I can’t think of a single anti-psychiatry activist who suggests that mental suffering doesn’t exist, or who suggests that we should leave sufferers to just get on with it, without any response or support. On the contrary, activists decry the abysmal lack of support; we demand more and better. Furthermore, there are plenty of critics of psychiatry who would not identify as anti psychiatry. It’s a subtle point – but critiquing something is not necessarily the same as being against it.
Depression is a real experience, a human experience, one shared by increasing numbers of people. But defining it as an individual illness lays the responsibility of the issue onto the shoulders of the one who is suffering, rather than on all the other factors that contribute to a person’s experience of living in a complex, dog-eat-dog society. Yet psychiatry claims that mental suffering is the product of a physical illness within the brain. Where is the evidence?
Critics of psychiatry also point to its abuse of power, when ‘treating’ people who are suffering. People who are suffering do not need to be ‘fixed’ within themselves; they need compassion and practical support.
Prof Gask has a stake in psychiatry, as her salary and professional reputation depend upon it. But there are many, many people whose experience at the hands of psychiatry reveal a culture where containment and coercion are rife, rather than care or support. She may scorn us as the “antipsychiatry brigade” and “naysayers” but our experience is just as real as hers, and our resulting opinions just as valid.
Her argument is lazy: lumping critiques of psychiatry in together with those who would dismantle social care. The DWP may very well be twisting the critique of the biomedical model for its own ends, but that is no reason to dismiss the critique itself. Nor to attack a movement which is fundamentally about reducing harm and suffering, not increasing it.
photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash