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   Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:10:03 JST Anti. 🐘

   “This book mobilises anti-capitalist, ‘mad’, disability justice and anti-racist thinking in particular to carve out a radical political approach to mental health. It names the capitalist economic system, specifically, as a significant producer of suffering in contemporary life. Capitalism, a system characterised by private ownership, wage labour, competition and the pursuit of profit, harms each and every one of us.”
   ~ Frazer-Carroll, Micha
   Mad World

   #CurrentlyReading

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:27 JST Anti. 🐘

     in reply to

     "We must champion alternative approaches that provide free, non-hierarchical, accessible, wide-ranging and community-controlled mental health support, to resist a right-wing neoliberal project of social murder through a combination of abandonment and control.3 If we believe that communities should have control over production, then it follows that we should have control over our healthcare and healing too."

     Micha Frazer-Carroll - Mad World

     Done ;) Great book. 9/10.

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:29 JST Anti. 🐘

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     "We are often led to believe that our societal approach to mental health, driven by capitalist qualities of impatience and rigidity, is the only way. However, when we expand our imaginations and open up space for ambiguity, collaboration, creativity, plurality and strangeness, new and surprising possibilities emerge."

     A liberated future, for mental health, will always be nuanced, contradictory, plural and relentlessly tailored to each and every individual."

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:30 JST Anti. 🐘

     in reply to

     "Ruth Wilson Gilmore says: ‘abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.’ If we want to end incarceration in all its forms, we need to build a world where we do not reactively force people to live, but one that is survivable."

     "Mental health responses must be community and patient-run, well-funded, free from entrenched power dynamics, and should centre care rather than force."

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:31 JST Anti. 🐘

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     "The diverse range of experiences that we call ‘mental health crises’ rarely spring up from nowhere.
     [...] If we really want them to be well, why don’t we go deeper than the ‘symptoms’ and address the economic and relational circumstances that lead to the suffering of so many? If we turn back the clock from the moment of crisis, we can almost always find numerous moments at which a person should have received care or attention, but didn’t have access to it."

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:33 JST Anti. 🐘

     in reply to

     I somehow messed up the thread, but here are some more quotes from the excellent book Mad World by Micha Frazer-Carroll, that i posted. Sorry for the mess.

     https://chaos.social/@antiaall3s/111294421887954633

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:34 JST Anti. 🐘

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     "While many of us argue for more funding and expansion in a struggle to access resources, this is an apt moment to interrogate what kinds of mental healthcare we want. Do we want a system that shuts people in and shuts people out? A system whose structures are focused on managing us in line with economic demands, rather than honouring our individuality and helping us heal? Are capitalist neoliberal ‘services’ the best we can dream of?"

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:35 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “the fear of punishment, including material consequences like having children taken away, prevents us from being honest, getting support, or even just being ourselves in daily life. It transforms mental ‘health’ into something we have no choice but to practise and perform – a logic that spills out further into neoliberal messaging that we all must look after ourselves and maintain our bodyminds in line with the demands of the state.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:37 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “In political movements, ‘prefiguration’ describes the idea that we should infuse our present actions with the values that we would like to see in future utopias. The disability activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes prefiguration as: ‘waking up and acting as if the revolution has happened.’8 These actions might be big or small, experimental or methodical. Either way, they are about bringing the futures that only exist in our most distant imaginations into the present”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:38 JST Anti. 🐘

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     "All disability, illness and suffering is deeply political, and each of these groups deserve liberation. Disabled movements have also at times been guilty of the same kind of disavowal – distancing themselves from the unpalatability of Madness/Mental Illness in an effort to gain respectability and rights. This mutual disavowal helps no one."

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:39 JST Anti. 🐘

     in reply to

     They turn diagnosis into a tool for solidarity rather than individualism.”

     "Diagnosis is a tool. Its utility and its violence can’t be viewed in a vacuum – they speak to the power dynamics entrenched in psychiatry, and the broader failures of biomedical frameworks to genuinely respond to human suffering and difference."

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:41 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “Communities that practise self-diagnosis also often actively reject biomedical approaches. Autistic communities have asserted that ‘autism’ describes a broad cluster of very real experiences of the world, not a discrete or objective biological disorder. When people are denied diagnosis or healthcare, community spaces that value self-diagnosis may offer a place to share tips, to better understand our shared oppression, and to organise against it. >

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:42 JST Anti. 🐘

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     "Doctors do not have a monopoly on the process of diagnosis – or, rather, of identification. They may hoard training, technologies, literature and other resources within the institution, and give the final rubber stamp for the purposes of the state. But positive identification processes are often actually collectively made in the community."

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:43 JST Anti. 🐘

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     "When people die by suicide while waiting for benefits or for trans healthcare, suicide may be read as a result of illness that originated from inside the person’s mind. The state’s responsibility for social murder is therefore diminished. This process of medicalisation also leads the living towards overwhelmingly medical ‘solutions’ for distress; we are prescribed drugs or cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) instead of revolution."

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:44 JST Anti. 🐘

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     "Since illness is constructed in the shadow of production, employers, the education system and the welfare state centre diagnosis just as much as medical and psychiatric institutions. Diagnosis is the arbitrary standard we must meet – a means of ‘bio-certification’ – that the state uses to separate the deserving from the undeserving. You may therefore need a diagnosis to get your benefits granted or to gain other forms of government support; or to get reasonable adjustments in education.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:45 JST Anti. 🐘

     in reply to

     THIS. BOOK. IS. SO. GOOD!!!1!!!!

     Mad World, Micha Frazer-Carroll

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:46 JST Anti. 🐘

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     "Under capitalism, being able to sell our labour is the definition of mental health, with ‘work’ being referenced almost 400 times in the DSM-5.54 As a result, the common denominator between almost all experiences categorised as Mental Illness is that they, in some way or another, diminish our productivity in work or education (or are otherwise disruptive to the social order in capitalist society).”

     Mad World, Micha Frazer-Carroll

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:49 JST Anti. 🐘

     in reply to

     discrimination at work, and to develop particular physical illnesses.”

     “The systematic diagnosis of schizophrenia among Black people was further used to pathologise their direct and organised responses to systemic racism. In the 1960s, the US psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Franck Simon suggested that Malcolm X and the civil rights movement had sparked a wave of violent schizophrenic symptoms and paranoid ‘racial antagonism’ in Black Americans.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:50 JST Anti. 🐘

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     socially significant categories like employable or unemployable, trustworthy or criminal, legal or illegal, intelligent or unintelligent, beautiful or ugly, exploiter or exploited, coloniser or colonised, rich or poor. People who are not read as white accumulate small and large bruises as we simply try to move through the world: we are more likely to live in poverty, to be subject to policing and its violence, to be incarcerated, to be deprived of knowledge about our histories, to experience >

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:51 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “Our mental health cannot be disentangled from the intertwined systems of white supremacy, ableism, gendered oppression, imperialism & capitalism. All forms of what we call ‘illness’ or suffering interact with the political world – a world that is particularly deadly for certain bodyminds. Therefore, while we might all be being driven Mad, some of us are inevitably made Madder than others.”

     “How we are racialised in the world has serious impacts on our bodyminds. Race sees people sorted into

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:52 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “Suffering follows the political contours of our lives. As the climate crisis accelerates and economic crises become more frequent, we are not short of possible explanations for the global surge in mental distress. It also follows that mental distress affects us unevenly, counter to mainstream narratives that tell us that ‘mental health does not discriminate’.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:53 JST Anti. 🐘

     in reply to

     its claims are socially and historically contextual, and closely tangled up in the demands of capitalist society.”

     “[..] we cannot ever definitively know mental health, and so many of the ways we currently try to know it are restricted, oppressive or depoliticising. They represent but a sliver of what is actually possible – and when we see these as the only options, we narrow the imagination.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:54 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “Psychiatric knowledge is also frequently damaging because of the dominance and power it holds in society. It is positioned as expert knowledge – bolstered by the institutional authority of science and medicine – and is therefore seen as more legitimate than knowledge that comes from people without power. [..] This power stems from the fact that, like the rest of medicine, psychiatry is seen to reveal internal, apolitical and ahistorical truths about our bodyminds, when, in actuality, >

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:56 JST Anti. 🐘

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     "We see contradictory statements about stigma all the time when people talk about mental health, for example, some people say they experience stigma because they take medication, others say they experience stigma because they don’t take medication. In actuality, both groups are experiencing sanism because of their supposedly spoiled identity.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:57 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “Over 50,000 people are still detained under the Mental Health Act each year,59 legislation that makes it possible to lock people up in psychiatric facilities without their consent. When people are hospitalised under section, many are still routinely subject to abuse, forced treatment, restraint and other violations in bodily autonomy. Many other Mad/Mentally Ill people are now incarcerated in prisons.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:58 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “In this climate, it is Madness that will help us burst beyond the ‘rational’ confines of the asylum, of the prison, of capitalism and individualism. As the world drives us increasingly Mad, it is crucial that we take Mad knowledge seriously, and acknowledge its imaginative potential. This journey began when I woke up in a dissociative dream. I believe various forms of dissociation, dreaming and escape from this world are the only way to transform it.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:09:59 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “In the current climate, we still largely discuss mental health in terms of individual identity (something we are) and property ownership (something we have) – rather than as a form of collective oppression (something that is done to us). Even in political spaces that are suspicious of state authority, deference to psychiatric ideas is very much the norm. We are scared to touch mental health, usually out of fear of getting the ‘science’ wrong.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:10:00 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “When we frame mental health in such a way, we bolster the idea that it is each person’s individual responsibility to stay well by seeking out therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, self-help books, crisis lines and more recently apps and self-care gurus, many of which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and profitable in the neoliberal era.”

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     Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Nov-2023 17:10:01 JST Anti. 🐘

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     “Capitalism birthed even the most commonplace social structures in which we distribute care, abuse and resources. It is no coincidence that the Western capitalist nuclear family unit is the institution that psychoanalysts have long located at the epicentre of our neuroses. Intimate relationships and marriages – another normalised economic unit – often produce trauma.”