(no paper
is attached to this workshop)
Race and gender are overrepresented
in psychiatric arrangements like medium secure units at the Centre
for Addiction and Mental Health. Cinderella Alallouf, a Jamaican
Canadian psychiatric inmate on such a ward, died shortly after giving
birth under observation in 1997. Her baby was conceived on the all-male
ward. Allalouf’s inquest opens questions regarding sexualization
of female inmates, and the ‘race-blind’ analysis of
her ‘care, control, and custody’. White male psychiatrists,
especially those hiding sexual liaisons with patients, are relied
upon to provide psychological and social data on the victim. Yet
psychiatric clinics have been multiculturalizing since the 1990s,
at least at the local major institution where Allalouf stayed (CAMH).
Not yet informed by Black psychiatric survivor testimony (Jackson,
2002), emerging antiracist critiques and applications of Western
institutional psychiatric ideas (e.g., Jonathan Metzl; and Joy DeGruy
Leary respectively) leave some questions unanswered for me. As the
pharmaceutical block sells itself abroad (Watters, 2010), what do
we do about the trauma of institutionalization that pits ‘normal’
versus ‘crazy’ in Black communities as well as White?
A Mad analysis provides not only a recovery of the incapacitated
body but in naturalistic historical terms, a polity of difference
or ‘identity’ that involves disorderly brains in our
social environments. Psychiatric survivors since Chamberlin (1978)
have called for small social environments for recovery (Deegan,
1988) in which ordinary (culturally relevant) interactions are allowed
to help a person recover. Folk or social methods that could rely
on non-Western conceptions, like an Indigenous knowledge about alterity,
is being occluded by multicultural applications of psychiatric behaviouralism.
References:
DeGruy Leary, Joy (2006). Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s
Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing.
Metzl, Jonathan (2009). The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia
Became a Black Disease.
Watters, Ethan (2010). Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American
Psyche |