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If we're engaging in the discourse, while I take ADHD meds and have benefited massively from both those and from DBT, I'm quite strongly opposed to about 85% of psychiatry as a field, at least the way it's structured now
Are ADHD medications very useful for enabling folks, including myself, to focus? Yes! Would I like a society structured such that I don't have to use them all the time? Also yes!
The problem is, if I told the ADHD people the meds are useful for some things, but being off them is also useful for other things, I'd quite possibly lose access to them full stop.
Likewise, has DBT helped me? Absolutely! Has CBT helped people I know? Absolutely! Have meds helped people I know? Again, absolutely! But the structure of the field itself applies a power dynamic that makes healing much more difficult in SO many cases
CW suicide mention
If I hadn't transitioned years ago, I couldn't talk candidly about my experiences of suicidal ideation with a therapist who's going to put that on my NHS notes, because it would almost certainly interfere with transition healthcare and access to ADHD meds
If I hadn't transitioned years ago, I couldn't talk candidly about my experiences of suicidal ideation with a therapist who's going to put that on my NHS notes, because it would almost certainly interfere with transition healthcare and access to ADHD meds
And that's before we get into the whole can of worms that is plurality and attempts to pathologise or treat it, by attempting to force integration or repression of headmates, which frequently leads to horrific trauma.
Am I anti-psych? I suppose in that sense I am. The field as a whole has done so much harm to so many people I know that the benefits some of us are able to get from it are outweighed, and I don't know if it can ever be divorced from that.
That's not to say a lot of what we currently obtain from the psychiatric system wouldn't continue in whatever my ideal world looks like - I'd still use ADHD meds part of the time in any world I can envisage creating, because they enable me - but the institution is built on harm.
I feel like that's the nuanced take we actually need here - "psychiatry is mostly pretty bad" doesn't automatically mean "ADHD is made up"
And I know there are attempts to reform the field of psychiatry. Those exist and they do achieve good things for specific groups of people. But can we reform something that's got all these assumptions about when a person is able to make the right decision for themselves baked in?
I suspect the answer is "maybe, but not under capitalism"
"anti-psychiatry-under-capitalism but not anti-treatment" is more of a mouthful but probably sums up how I actually feel about a lot of this stuff
Would a truly informed-consent model of access to the treatments currently provided by psychiatry a) be similar enough to what we have now to be called psychiatry and b) be possible in a society structured around profit and productivity? I don't know, I'm leaning towards "no"
This has been your scheduled rambling, tune in next week for more social commentary from a literal certifiable lunatic
The tweet about ADHD that everyone's dunking on can fuck off though.
I don't want to hear takes on psychiatry from abled/sane/neurotypical anticapitalists or from disabled/mad/neurodivergent people who buy into the idea of capitalist productivity being the ultimate way to measure the value of treatment.
I say capitalist productivity because I'm a lot more help to most people most of the time if I'm on my ADHD meds, and I wouldn't want to completely lose my ability to stick with a task after the initial dopamine rush wears off even in a completely utopian society
As for my views on good, progressive people going into psychiatry (and I lump things like therapy and counselling into that as well as clinical psychiatric medicine), I view it less like good people becoming cops and more like good people becoming, say, civil engineers
That's in the sense that while the structure under which they're currently working causes a lot of harm, some of the concepts they're learning and some of the skills they develop are things that we'll need wherever society ends up.
People with knowledge of how to build a bridge more effectively mean I'm less likely to fall into a river than someone 300 years ago, people with knowledge of plurality and how to handle plural switches mean I'm less likely to be burnt at the stake by a mob for being Mad
Someone: "Wow Robin, you should write essays on Medium or something!"
Me: "OK, so firstly, I'm not Robin, and secondly, motherfucker, I have ADHD! Tweet threads are the only way I can communicate my points!"
Me: "OK, so firstly, I'm not Robin, and secondly, motherfucker, I have ADHD! Tweet threads are the only way I can communicate my points!"
One day we really need to do a study on whether twitter has warped my ADHD brain into working in 240-character chunks or whether ADHD did that itself, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do that would probably fall under the umbrella of "psychiatry" now
