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| Michel Foucault e Jean Paul Sartre durante unao sciopero operaio della Renault www.diewelt.de |
Turning the Tables: Using the Academy in the Battle Against Psychiatry
da Mad in America: https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/10/turning-tables-using-academy-battle-psychiatry/
12 ottobre 2016
The impetus for this article is an exciting new scholarship endowed
in perpetuity which has just been launched at University of Toronto. It
is a “matching scholarship” in which I personally match up to $50,000
of contributions by other donors. Called “The Dr. Bonnie Burstow
Scholarship in Antipsychiatry,” the scholarship is to be awarded
annually to a thesis student at OISE/UT conducting antipsychiatry
research. An award of this nature is historically unprecedented, and as
such, is itself something to celebrate. It is also part of a larger
phenomenon of using academia in the battle against psychiatry. Shedding
light on that larger phenomenon as well as on the scholarship per se,
such are the purposes of this article.
Why have I dubbed this article “Turning the Tables”? Because what is
involved here is precisely taking a leaf from psychiatry’s book. In this
regard, not unlike other hegemonic disciplines, albeit far more
aggressively than most, as shown by Foucault (1963/1973) and Burstow
(2015), psychiatry has long used academia to legitimate its claims and
further what it regards as “knowledge”. Not only does academic
psychiatry train people to think/act in ways that serve it, its sheer
existence serves as a primary source of legitimation.
Albeit we do not have the potential to make the same kind of inroads,
let me suggest, it behooves those of us who oppose psychiatry to
likewise use academia. Herein we have the opportunity to challenge, to
educate, moreover to lend a hand to what Michel Foucault (1980) calls
“the insurrection of subjugated knowledge.” In the process, we can at
once further antipsychiatry knowledge and add to its perceived
legitimacy.
