| A range of thoughts,
feelings and actions pathologized as Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum
Disorders or are vastly underrepresented in Mad movement narratives.
In this interdisciplinary study, I technically explored how I have
used autoethnography as a methodological tool for practicing “active
disloyalty” against totalizing psychiatric and Mad paradigms
(Mohanty, 2003, p. 504). I discussed how my situated epistemology
of morbid thoughts—graphic thoughts that are taboo and aggressive
against loved ones or the self—can critically and credibly provide
a counter-discourse not only to ‘OCD’ as irrational and
meaningless, but to Mad tropes of the idiosyncratic genius or eccentric,
artistic spirit. I sought to demedicalize without romanticizing through
using the complexity of embodied narrative from the standpoint of
an anti-racist, queer and feminist student scholar. My use of self/biographical
writing as a model for initiating resistance against psychiatry followed
the general tradition of Binder Wall (2006), in which an ethnographic
study of my patient records is used to conjure ‘mad’ moments
from my memory. From these selected moments, such as the time I self-diagnosed
in my youth, I revealed how sense-making is mediated by ruling relations,
in particular the economics of understanding how we are ‘irrational’
and how we must self-survey. From my standpoint as a marginalized
Asian Canadian woman, I considered how my family’s history as
working and middle class immigrants reveals the racial and class dimensions
of psy discourse. What follows was a consideration of how embodied
narrative can be used not as individualized therapy, but as a rigorous,
collective consciousness-raising practice. |