People say and post ‘end mental health stigma’ because they don’t realise or understand that stigma is the name of the game - stigma is the point, stigma is the process, stigma is the power, stigma is the labelling, stigma is the centre of mental health and psychiatry.
A Thread
Without stigma, there are no psychiatric labels. They can’t exist.
You can only be diagnosed with a mental disorder if someone in power believes you differ sufficiently from ‘normal people’, and are therefore ‘mentally disordered’ - the entire thing is stigma and stigmatising.
Therefore, if you remove all stigma, you dismantle the system of mental health & the concept of psychiatry too.
Most people don’t understand that.
They think there is a way to diagnose, medicate, section & imprison people - but just ‘end the stigma’, but that is not possible.
One of the attitudes I test a lot in my academic research is the answer to this item:
‘I believe women and girls should report all instances of male violence in order to protect other women and girls from the same perpetrator’
I usually follow this up with the next item:
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‘I believe that women and girls should be held responsible if they don’t report to the police, and then their perpetrator goes on to attack another woman or girl’
I’ve tested these two items on thousands of people over the last few years, and the results are always concerning.
Anywhere between 20-90% of people will agree with the first item. Anywhere between 20-60% will agree with the second item.
I strongly believe that one of the biggest mistakes we ever made was psychologically and systemically separating ‘us’ from ‘them’ - ‘the clients’ from ‘the professionals’.
Here’s why ⬇️
It’s a false dichotomy. It is an illusion that serves the professional. It makes them feel powerful.
We have all been groomed into believing the ‘them’ and ‘us’ story.
That the professionals are the together, clever, supported, educated, compassionate, stable ones - and the clients are the chaotic, vulnerable, unstable, uneducated ones.
There are 10 common myths about male violence towards women and girls that are holding us back from making any change:
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1. If a woman is raped, she will fight back or scream for help
Fact: Over 70% of women who are raped will freeze and will stay silent. Fighting back is extremely rare. It is safer for many to stay still, and it is often involuntary.
2. Only vulnerable women are abused
Fact: Domestic and sexual abuse of women is common across all demographics, regardless of age, class, background, education, status or ability. Male violence is so common that it transcends all factors.
The reason there is so much Christian symbolism in horror films about psychiatric wards & insane asylums is because after the witch trials were made illegal, Christian churches set up ‘insane asylums’ where the treatment for ‘hysteria’ & ‘madness’ was conversion to Christianity.
It is important that we understand the enduring and devastating relationship that psychiatry and religion had/has with each other and the way we never really moved from seeing people as evil, mentally ill, insane & mad.
History is vital to our understanding of current oppression
The insane asylums were terrifying places. The vast majority of people sent there were women and minorities. They were tortured, abused, raped, converted, not allowed to speak their mother tongue, gaslit, controlled and in lots of cases, they were murdered.
A reminder that Elsevier made $10.5 BILLION in 2022 from selling your academic journals and articles behind paywalls, and make more profit than Amazon, Google, and Apple every year…
And paid the academics who wrote the articles $0
And paid the reviewers of the articles $0
This is why I don’t participate in the academic publishing industry. The academics are convinced that the only way their ideas will be taken seriously is if they GIVE AWAY their work to billion dollar corporations who will sell their work forever behind paywalls.
The publishing companies control the information and evidence bases, ensuring that only a tiny percentage of people ever have access to knowledge and information. They have such a monopoly, that if you don’t give your work to them, you’re seen as less ‘academic’.