Meaning in Psychosis, and the Other
https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/11/culture-influences-voice-hearing-interview-stanford-anthropologist-tanya-luhrmann/?fbclid=IwAR3UE7UTauF3JbjUQihD-PNryKvkF0w0eMDfx0V2YUQcjI7jAVscQ9R6sCA impacted me tremendously today.
Dr. Tanya Luhrmann's Mad In America interview from November 20, 2020 is ab fab beautiful. What Dr. Luhrmann speaks to about big Psychiatry's misunderstanding of racial and cultural difference fascinates me. Psychosis, hearing voices, having auditory commands, seeing, sensing has deeper meaning than it simply psychotropically dosed to death. Deeper meaning within appropriate cultural context is instead promulgated by psychiatry and the US Public Community Mental Health business. BIPOC people are largely diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia, Schizoaffective with Bipolar Psychosis while the non-BIPOC counterpart isn't. BIPOC people with a mental health history are being jailed, asylumed, involuntarily committed, incarcerated and warehoused into the backrooms. We are being systematically and systemically racially discriminated against and dismissed in the name of DSM driven usual clinically, medically necessarily fashion of "care."
People from different cultures suffer mental health diagnosis through misunderstanding of meaning. Different worlds of meaning are drugged into "silence" and where voices and music must be separated from the person experiencing it, is no way to treat difference (the other).
I am organizing the Surviving Race Dialogues & Retreat 21 | Savannah held on August 31 - September 2, 2021 in historic Savannah. OPEN EXCELLENCE is a primary sponsor for this effort. We are extremely concerned with BIPOC people being inundated by policing, systemic racism, involuntary commitments, jailing and incarceration. We are being warehoused into psychiatric asylum and losing our lives behind bars. At the Dialogues & Retreat 21, we will address systemic racism, Black racism, psychiatric oppression, police violence, tracing hx roots of slavery, mental health, prison systems and its impact on our future.