Reading this article Clarissa linked to, concerning stimulant medication prescriptions for US children. I have an absolute horror and contempt at people turning to authorities to help them with emotional problems. I’m almost inclined to draw the line at people getting any sort of medical “help” from the psychiatric profession at all. In fact, my PhD thesis, concerning DAMBUDZO MARECHERA, was also around and about this topic. He was considered mad by almost everyone, but his self-awareness enabled him to produce very beautiful poems and prose. And the colonial authorities were almost certainly trying to use psychiatry to tame his radical leftist dissent.
Here is more from the article:
The conventional wisdom is backwards. The black patient isn't resistant to admitting he has depression, he is resistant to the white doctor's attempt at labeling him depressed, and consequently marginalizing him, diverting attention away from the social factors over which the doctor is nervous to discuss and powerless to change. "You have depression" is the nimble dance around the question of whether a white doctor can understand a black patient's life. It is a delicate thing to say to a black woman that perhaps her man isn't worth a damn, as she just said out loud to you but you're not sure if you're allowed to echo back, maybe these kind of relationships are culturally appropriate? It's tough to know when most of your information about black people comes from Martin Luther King quotes and The New Yorker.
Lacking any common language to bridge racial, economic, or sexual divides, clinicians hide behind the invented terminology of psychiatry. Medications become the physical manifestation, the proof, that the language is real.
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