The relationship between race and the treatment of Mad people
Question 1
The relationship between race and the treatment of Mad people is demonstrated through the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous people. One way is how psychological tools are used to instill and encourage a colonial mentality on immigrants. This is carried out through the education program they are taken through, which acts as self-help, which is a psychological tool. A colonial order is, therefore, maintained, which fails to recognize the sovereignty of the Indigenous community (Tam, 2013). This colonial order primarily targets the extinction of the legal and cultural rights of the indigenous people. Mental health institution has also played a role in the ongoing displacement and assimilation of migrants and the Indigenous community through their involvement in multiple projects of settlement. The construction of mental health has been actively shaped and formed by several racial projects, while its definition and meaning outlined by nation-states and global policy frameworks (Tam, 2013). For example, psychiatric oppression and sanism have shaped the Indigenous people in ways that mark them differently from the other racialized people. The delineation of people’s mental capacities, which include the psychological explanations people may give, for the perceived racial inferiority, have immensely contributed to the subordination of the Aboriginals and people of color. Race and madness are connected through people’s multiple identities, and their discursive and material co-production. Sanity or insanity is therefore perceived as a division which shifts based on how other facets of social difference are organized. The theory of conviviality that is used to map madness regards madness as something we can possess but not identify or classify it as madness. By referring to colonial and post-colonial and transnational governing structures, racial oppression can be argued to be sustained by madness, which occurs through peoples’ encounters with spy knowledge.
Question 2
It is important to consider the use of language within the psychiatry vs. Mad studies. Since people live in and through words, words, and language therefore matter. Words and language have a significance in the battle against psychiatry (Burstow, 2013). The words used by psychiatrists are backed by laws, which gives them the force of the law. Psychiatrists can provide performative utterances by using specific terms that create discourse. Medicalized words are seen to be covering something which is not inherently medical, and that is the control and imprisonment of those perceived to be mentally unhealthy. The ‘mad’ language has its benefits, which include promoting the acceptance of difference, facilitates celebration and pride, and explores the forbidden regions of the mind. It, however, also has disadvantages, which are primarily due to the fact that it dwells on the cultural and the existential, and this discourse can easily descend into liberalism, which disregards the structural (Burstow, 2013). The Antipsychiatry movement has coined terms referred to as reclaimed since most of them are traditionally associated with something dangerous.
Reclaimed terms can either jeopardize or assist the fight of stemming the power of psychiatry. The most reliable words in this fight are the refusal terms. The terms used by anti-psychiatry have the strength of being oppositional but speaks the truth. This language may, therefore, alienate officials or people seen as potential allies. Another downside of the language also stems from its strength, which is that it can be upsetting to survivors who may not perceive themselves as harmed and consider psychiatry as a rapidly improving resource.
The differing terms in the psychiatric and mad studies realm determine of those perceived to be sane and insane. Euphemisms such as mental patients and mental hospitals have greatly contributed to obscuring the real situation, which is that mental hospitals are actually psychiatric prisons (Burstow, 2013). It also masks the fact that the term ‘psychiatric treatment’ is really a form of social control.