So after seeing this play out recently https://lemmygrad.ml/post/367002/comment/275850 where the community seemed to be posting articles without even bothering to read the content (the study literally had a pro-SSRI arguement in the abstract…) I decided to give the community a bit more of a whirl and see if they had anything of substance to share.
As another example of a random post I picked out;
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/368364?scrollToComments=true
We have someone putting forward the person Joanna Moncrieff.
Why is Joanna Moncrieff significant?
At face value we see that see appears to have legit creditentials; she has a long, legit career of working as a doctor within a psych capacity and has a acredited degree in medicine. She oppouses anti-psych medication views based on as she frames ‘new research’ showing that the theory once held by mainstream psych doctors on the brains inablity to produce enough seritonin was false.
The issue with this is that this link is not new, it was proven 30 years ago. We still know that they do work, we just dont know why. A helpfull anology would be with gravity; if we found a new variable that better explained something to do with it, it would not invalidate all previous laws; just improve them because we would now more understand that we dont fully understand the issue, and we can now try to take another guess as to why it works. To conclude this point she is grifting because she is presenting this information as something new, fully knowing it is not. Likely hoping to lure in people who have been failed by the medical system because of neo-liberalism and exploit them for profit. It is a symptom of neo-liberalism and is class exploitation at its worst, as it tends to hit the disabled.
Tens of thousands of studies have been done on the efficiecy of psychatric help in regards to SSRIs that are all peer reviewed and used scientific methods such as control groups and such.
Is there valid criticisms of the psychatric institutes of capital?
100%
But they are not to be found in the grifters trying to make careers out of anti-intuclectuallism. The anti-psychartic position is completely devoid of marxist analysis; we only need to look at academics like Althusser, who stipulates that psych hospitals have historically been used by fascists to deem communists as ‘mentally ill’ and imprison them against there will. This fate hit many communists like Antonio Gramsci.
Yet there is no mention of any marxists in that community, only psuedo-science.
It is my opinion that the community should be removed and instead replaced with a socialist psychology instance which can discuss psychology done thru an actual marxist perspective.
I think the saddest part about that community are that some of the frequent posters are
it is why we should wash our hands of it and instead provide marxist critiques of the structure of capitalist/neo-liberal psychology and how it is manipulated; which are far more valuable.
It is the lazy critique to figure the above out then decide to completely throw out the field, but it is a trap and it captures the mentally ill looking for easy answers. But it is counter-productive, in my opinion. There lies real critique of it, they just lack the methodology needed to arrive at the right results; which is not anti-medication but anti-private interest funding (Nationalisation) and also of course, removing the upper class capital pigs from rule.
That’s sad to you? So you just want people under a label to get drugged? and you think it’s bad for people to quit drugs that don’t help anyone.
Yeah. We need a marxist view of Psychiatry; otherwise, we’re shooting in the dark.
There’s a book that attempts to critique Psychiatry through marxism: Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness. (I haven’t read into it; just found it through Mad in America.)
And how do you know this? You’re claiming that Psychiatry is a science without even reading into the Anti-Psychiatry movement.
Anti-medication?! Anti-psychiatry was never anti-medication; they are against forceful and manipulative drugging.