Chapter 6 - Maladjusted Patients: The Agency of the User/Survivor Movement

Summary

The chapters so far have focused on cases in which people's mental and emotional fitness for public life has been disputed. In the Brexit referendum and the Occupy movement, we saw psychiatric concepts being deployed in medicalising attacks against political actors. Although some observers claimed that Occupy disproportionately attracted individuals with mental disorders, there was no prima facie reason to think that either Occupy or Remainers were defined by mental disorder. Certainly, neither took this to be one of their collective characteristics. A central concern about the medicalisation of negative emotions is that the words and deeds of ‘normal’ political dissenters might be dismissed on medical grounds. But there is another important type of case to consider. Some political actors acknowledge that they have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, and are, hence, already acting or trying to act politically under the stigma of mental disorder. Where better to look than at these very actors if we want to understand how the medicalisation of negative emotions affects political agency?

Many people diagnosed with mental disorder have rejected the current state of mental healthcare. Some are acting with others to challenge the authority of psychiatry and the public perception of mental disorder. These individuals and the groups they have formed are sometimes collectively referred to as the psychiatric service user/survivor movement, indicating that it consists of mental health service users and self-described survivors of psychiatric services and social exclusion. This movement's members face empowering and disempowering factors that can inform our understanding of the political impact of the medicalisation of negative emotions. Not only have many been formally medicalised through a diagnosis, they also self-consciously struggle to politicise experiences and issues that sit within the supposedly apolitical relationships and spaces of psychiatry and medicine (see Lewis 2006). As I suggested in Chapter 2, medicalisation constitutes a strong background condition of political action for users/survivors. While most have not been deprived of legal rights, we shall see that users/ survivors face other forms of marginalisation, which are maintained and exacerbated by various aspects of public and psychiatric discourse. The case of the user/survivor movement is of broader importance for two reasons.