Social contagion

[sewagelag00n]

Remember a long time ago I posted about how the gay leftist liberal agenda etc affected me?

I saw a post on tumblr about it, and honestly this summarizes it very succinctly:

“oh you wouldn’t identify as transgender if you hadn’t been exposed to other trans people and learned what being transgender was” you’re right! i’d identify as suicidal

Here's the article that was linked in the post. Admittedly, I've only skimmed it, although I do already have thoughts about it.

"If the social reality being created maintains the existing hierarchies it's healthy, but if it threatens them it's pathological."

I also think of antipsych here. Deviating from what's currently in power has always been pathologized as a cudgel against marginalized people. So why should modern psychiatry be any different than calling being gay a mental illness or suppressing feminists by calling them hysteric, which we all acknowledge to be a total sham? "Oh yeah, that was all false. So silly, not like modern psychiatry that's all totally true we promise." 

We must continue to criticize psychiatry with an understanding of societal context. Not every "mental illness" is all in your head. By encouraging hyper-individualism, the psychiatric system grooms sufferers into believing that they need to isolate, recede into a cocoon of "healing" and emerge born anew, able to navigate human interaction with ease, the way society deems acceptable. 

I am not sure if I've posted Less Tiktok, More Screaming on this journal yet. I read this article years ago--before I was properly antipsych, before The Incident--and it's stuck in my head ever since. 

A select passage: "Even without this social signaling, the lessons we learn inside of therapy favor a sort of hyperindividualistic self-sufficiency that encourages clients to prioritize personal growth over communal welfare or institutional change. When you imagine yourself to exist separate from the world around you, and therefore seek to change yourself independent of it, the project of self-improvement becomes about adapting to oppression, rather than working toward a less maddening world. Therapy that prioritizes individual self-improvement with little other context functions to create hypernormal, docile subjects that live in service to power. We become our best selves, not in ways that allow us to find personal peace and better serve the world around us, but in ways that make us better workers and citizens. Even if the system is contributing to our pain, we are actively encouraged to find ways we can fit better into that system. The subtext is always that we have no other option." 

Antipsychiatry is synonymous with opening your eyes to the ill state of wider society, and how you can't therapize a bad situation away. 

Comments

[starfrighter]

what youre writing about and citing here reminds me of a class im taking and what ive been thinking about recently, in that words like "homosexual" were originally created to pathologize and criminalize certain behaviors that were seen as abnormal, but now the word is used as a self-descriptor.

"If the social reality being created maintains the existing hierarchies it's healthy, but if it threatens them it's pathological." Like, sexuality as an identity descriptor has risen from a specific sociohistorical climate and i feel like many queer people are too quick to essentialize their experiences (ie i am born this way). Trying to recreate and assimilate into existing hierarchies and throwing people who experience more acute/intersecting forms of marginalization under the bus in order to do so.

anyway bye !!

[sewagelag00n]

TRUEEE TRUE TRUE TRUE I also dislike “Born This Way” narratives bc theyre basically a way for cishet/Sane people to feel secure in thinking, oh those people over there arent like us because they were Born That Way and it was predestined. Surely the environment doesnt affect peoples genders and sexualities and mental states. We are Calvinist Now

[starfrighter]

we are calvinist now :(