Welcome!
We have a different perspective of “mental health” & “mental illness.” We value diversity & see there's no single model for a “healthy mind.”
Our differences shouldn't be defined by authority figures intent on fitting us into narrow versions of “normality,” who simply stereotype people with medical language.
Power.
Mental health is about
politics & social inequality.
Psychiatric interventions are the result of relations of power, & the powerful benefit from controlling & silencing how we speak about an unjust world.
Their tools of social domination have grown into a global industrial complex that profits from framing our experiences as chronic illnesses.
They have a history of diagnosing entire groups (queer, black, poor, women, trans, sick, or simply abnormal) to justify violence & exclusion.
On "madness."
Strong emotional reactions to injustice are not wrong, they are human. And the silence of the public is not being "mentally healthy."
We must unlearn social conditioning from years of drug treatment, schooling, & behavior modification programs.
We should return the pathologizing gaze to our crazy-making world.
And see the movement of people viewed as "not normal" is often simply activism like being anti-racist, pro-queer, anti-corporate, anti-war, etc.
Blaming brains.
We challenge the assumptions of bio-psychiatry, who's "medical model" assumes that mental health issues are the result of chemical imbalances in the brain.
Biopsychiatry is the belief that the problems and solutions of our lives are located solely in the individual. And that's the same ideology that's cut our social safety nets & destroyed our communities.
Having more options.
We value diverse forms of expertise, eg peer support, listening, dialogue, & mutual aid. We challenge the exclusive voice of the formal "experts" of the mind.
The perspectives of trauma survivors should not be silenced by professional mental health profiteers & institutions.
