Anti-Psychiatry

Can Psychiatry Be A Political Tool Of The State?

In today’s edition of Psychology with Arjun, I want to start with a story instead of simply diving into the theory of Anti-psychiatry. The story was widely covered when it first came up and it’s sad, but apt, that this story has now been forgotten by most of the people in the country. The story is of a doctor from Telangana, by the name of Dr K Sudhakar Rao.

Dr K Sudhakar Rao after being arrested on May 16 2020

Dr Rao came into the news early during the COVID-19 pandemic when he criticized his state government for not providing enough masks and PPE gear to tackle the pandemic. It was early in the pandemic. We were all very scared, and there was this doctor telling us that we were not as prepared as we were made to think.

One day, the doctor was arrested while staging a lone protest on the road where he was in an allegedly drunken state. He ended up getting in a brawl with the policemen trying to control him. He was stripped of his clothes, beaten and tied up before being arrested and taken to the hospital for a check-up.

It was expected that the doctor would be jailed and await trial there. After all, that is what usually happens when someone breaks the law. This time, though, something different happened. Dr Sudhakar was committed to a mental institution on behalf of the government to ‘treat his mental condition’. (Despite him having no history of psychological dysfunction)

Until now, Dr Sudhakar had been getting a lot of media attention. He was seen as a brave individual who dared to speak up against the government but as soon as the news of him being in a mental hospital came forward, the news disappeared.

It was as if everything he had been saying was declared invalid due to an apparent ‘mental condition’.

Dr Sudhakar stopped being covered by the news. His news cycle had ended but his troubles had just begun. He alleged being mistreated inside the hospital and was undergoing trial for his acts. Here are some excerpts from a letter he wrote demanding a transfer to a new hospital.

The above drugs are given to me gave reaction and my lips are dried, urine stopped….major side effect is bronchal pneumonia. They [the doctors] are giving so many anti-psychotic medicines to a normal person like me……The hospital atmosphere is very very unpleasant for psychiatric patients. The atmosphere is disturbing me….

Letter dated 27 May 2020

Dr Sudhakar died on May 21, 2021, of a heart attack while recovering from COVID. He was still undergoing treatment from the mental hospital and was still awaiting the decision of his trial.

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Power, Politics and Psychiatry

The story of Dr Sudhakar is the perfect case for the cause of anti-psychiatry. Here was this doctor who had made the mistake of speaking against the state and for that, he was declared mad and locked away in a mental institute. What then, is the difference between a prison and a mental institute if the State is going to use the two interchangeably?

This is what Michel Foucault, a social philosopher, believed. Foucault’s idea was simple. ‘Madness’ was used as an excuse by governments all over the world to exclude people or thoughts or practices that they considered undesirable in society. For him, psychiatry was simply a form of social engineering, just like prisons.

Foucault wrote extensively about the practice of psychiatry and was a vocal critic of the inhuman practices that were carried out by psychiatrists at the time. After all, it was the 1960s and 70s. There were very few options for treatment that a psychiatrist had. It was either medicines or electroconvulsive shocks. Neither were certain to help.

Foucault thought that the medical franchise should be seen as an arm of exercising political power. Imagine the power that a psychiatrist has to decide who gets to participate in society and who does not. How can one be sure that such power would not be misused by a psychiatrist? Or that it would not become a tool of politicians to declare their opponents mad.

What happens if, tomorrow, Rahul Gandhi goes for a simple medical checkup in a government hospital but there, he is transferred to a mental hospital and declared a patient. Would anyone ever take him seriously after that? But then again, who does.

Foucault’s thoughts were resonated by Thomas Szasz, a Hungarian Psychiatrist who was strongly opposed to the practice of psychiatry. He didn’t believe that something like mental illnesses could exist. For him, these were simply ‘problems in living’ that had been medicalized to give power to the psychiatrist.

The Anti-Anti-Psychiatrist

Among these voices, there was another voice, that of RD Laing, who never liked calling himself an anti-psychiatrist but he was deeply influential to the movement.

We always see mental illness as something being situated in the body of a person, or at least, in their mind/brain. The psychiatrist tries to solve these problems by fixing the brain but Laing believed that it was a shortsighted approach to mental illness.

He was certain that these illnesses exist but he didn’t think they existed in a person. He thought they existed in an environment, in the social surroundings of the person, in the culture of the place where this individual is located.

Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

R.D. Laing

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged on in 2020-21, there were reports suggesting that the number of people with a mental illness had skyrocketed in the two years due to the isolation, loss of jobs, loss of life and other personal damages but if Laing were alive today, he would simply say, “What is wrong with that?”

We live in unhappy times. Every day we are told how many of our fellow humans have died due to a microscopic virus. How then can one be expected to be happy and thrive? For him, this is not an example of increasing mental illnesses. It is a human response to an inhumane situation.

Laing did not see mental illness as something that needed to be cured. He saw it as an experience, a journey, that an individual goes through which might make them wiser and more experienced on the other end. This is probably as close as he ever got, to being an active anti-psychiatry voice.

Anti-Psychiatry Today

The experiences of Dr Sudhakar Rao are proof that the antipsychiatry movement has failed to achieve what it wanted to - which was a deconstruction of the practice of psychiatry and removal of forced institutionalization. The movement continues to be an afterthought in mainstream discourses.

Yet, every once in a while there is a realization among people that there is something fishy about how the mental health industry works in the 21st century. The works of Foucault and Laing continue to be quoted by patients who have been mistreated by their psychiatrists, but their experiences are written off as individual mishappenings.

While the idea may seem like it is dead in the water, antipsychiatry lives on as a strong undercurrent in modern psychiatry.

We never know when this current comes to the surface next but we know that one day, it certainly will.

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Question Of The Week

Do you believe Foucault’s idea that psychiatrists can and do, misuse their power to silence undesirable voices in society?

You can let me know by replying to this email or in the comments :)

Until next time,

Arjun Gupta