Martin Harrow (1933-2023)
Psychiatry is the branch of medicine concerned with the study, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illness. There is however ever increasing concern in the psychiatric survivor movement as to how many so-called mental illnesses can be beneficially treated using a medical model, whether they can be responsibly diagnosed, and as to how many mental health issues are created by socio-economic and working environments rather than underlying chemical imbalances or medical deficiencies.
My selective history of psychiatry focuses, in part, on its the history in London and Edinburgh, but also on international material collated during my years twelve or so years campaigning against problematic twenty-first century psychiatry. The seminal work on depressive disorders by Professor Joanne Moncrieff at UCL has epitomised the urgent need for, albeit belated, change to, or replacement of, the entire discipline of psychiatry.
Psychiatry has frequently been used to damage or destroy many queer people’s lives e.g by imposing courses of aversion therapy for ‘sexual perversions’ (Davison, 2020). Even when a psychiatric maltreatment damages people regardless of their gender or orientation, it injures a disproportionately large number of queer folk, simply because queers are more likely to have mental health issues. For Martin Harrow’s empirical investigations that invalidate the standard treatment of schizophrenia by anti-psychotics, see Whitaker (2023).
No comments:
Post a Comment