Member-only story
Internalized Psychiatry
Why am I so against psychiatric diagnoses? Because I think they are very dangerous. For the ones receiving them as well as for the ones giving them.
We talk about internalized ableism, where someone disabled (just meaning not able) have internalized harmful views and biases on what and who a disabled person is, then critically (and often harshly) treating themselves according to these biases. Believing their dis-ability is somehow making them less of a person/human, and that it is defining them.
I think the same thing goes on with psychiatric diagnoses. People receiving them internalize the psychiatrists’ and psychiatry at large views on them. And start to see themselves as psychiatry sees them.
They start to see themselves as disordered, sick, mentally ill, disturbed, and through all the other words and descriptions used in psychiatry.
While the ones handing the diagnoses out — see themselves as free from all of this, as the “healthy ones”, and this creates a division between those who diagnose and those who are diagnosed but joins them together in the belief that is it something wrong with the diagnosed one.
I think having human experiences of grief, abandonment, betrayal, abuse, neglect, violence, war, rape, forced migration, poverty and so on — and what people do to survive experiences like that —…
