Psychiatry vs. The Chilean Miners

Educational Material by The Blue Panthers Party.

This video is intended to be a critique of psychiatry using psychiatric labels to stigmatise, control and punish people based on how they behave, think and feel about occurrences in their lives. These occurrences obviously include issues that you do not hear so much about in the media and they include social problems such as the disregard for, exploitation, oppression and abuses of a group of people (e.g. working class) by a more powerful group of people (e.g. elite, ruling class, middle class) . So it happens, for example, that one group is send to war and gets blown to bits or sent down a mine shaft and contracts all sorts of physical health problems or gets buried alive while the other groups makes a profit and is celebrated as the real heroes (apparently "front-line soldiers do not win wars", and "workers in factories do not create internationally successful corporations). When something goes wrong blame virtually always travels down and when individuals protest against what is happening to them they can get quickly stigmatised by being defined as "mentally ill" and punished by being forcefully admitted to psychiatric hospitals, as well as being drugged (psychoactive drugs) and shocked (electroconvulsive therapy).

The use of "psychiatric labels" can lead to the belief that people can be afflicted by factual things (e.g. mental illness, psychological disorders) without realising that these "psychiatric disorders" are constructs (metaphors) that depend on historical and cultural contexts. A hundred years ago there were only a handful of psychiatric disorders and now there are over 300. Then the diagnosis of "depression" did not exist and people would more commonly refer to "nerves" or "melancholy". On the other hand there were diagnoses that are no longer in official use such as "drapetomania" to pathologise the behaviour of slaves who wanted to escape from their captors, or "hysteria" to pathologise women's behaviour when standing up and protesting against male-domination. This is not to deny that people can find themselves in a variety of predicaments and problems which can cause distress and misery (e.g. fear, sadness). At the same time one should be aware that
different people can respond to similar occurrences in society in very different ways, and make sense of their experiences in their very own ways.

As a society we seem to forget that people can have an incredible amount of strength, resilience and resourcefulness. It is unfortunate that the mental health movement which led to the creation of today's therapeutic culture (with its beginning in the 1970's) has successfully transformed our view of people as stoic and able to simply get on with live when facing adversity into viewing them as passive, weak, incompetent and helpless emotional wrecks in desperate need of some professional help to sort our their lives.

The problem is often how society (and of course the media) expects people to behave, feel and think when having undergone certain experiences (e.g. social scripts that dictate how to behave, think and feel when someone you know dies, such as feeling sad, wearing black, etc.) which when coming from experts (e.g. scientists, psychiatrists, etc.) can have a considerable effect on people when trying to make sense of their own experiences and behaviour. And then there are of course the very important practical issue of healthcare benefits as well as insurance payouts when accepting the labels of "psychiatric disorders". Finally, the dominant discourse which in this case focuses on the experiences and behaviour of individual miners in relation to the accident suppresses other equally if not more important discussions around such things as working conditions, working hours, pay, health and safety, which would bring into focus the people who might ultimately be
held responsible for the disaster.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Anti-Psychiatry
• Chilean Miners
• Blue
• Panthers
• Party

[djcritter76]

Thanks for your comments Pregolegs! Please have a look at the description which hopefully clarifies that this video is meant to be a general critique of psychiatry.

[Transmintosity]

...as medical problems, and that psychiatrists have the panaceas for these ills, which they don't.

[Transmintosity]

Everything you say was mint, but I particularly liked the third paragraph, about the strength and indomitability of the individual, which has been supplanted by a view of indivduals as weak and in need of guidance, which only serves to hypertrophy the power the state has over its subjects. This therapeutic culture has wittingly or unwittingly led to a state of affairs where people see their problems in living, sometimes self-afflicted, sometimes externally imposed, sometimes both....

[Pregolegs]

If you've kept up with news of the miners, especially from Spanish language sources, you'll know that the psychological reaction has been mixed. Some miners are suffering from clinical depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Appearance doesn't equal reality. Mario Sepulveda, the "happiest" miner, required extra psychiatric care. Edison Peña, who sang on Letterman, had to be re-hospitalized. Other miners haven't experienced symptoms. Depends on the individual.