I’m a person who was pretty badly harmed by the psych system and all that entails and I think I would feel better if I could read some wiser peoples’ words about it lol. Surely there must be some good political theory or academic writings about this that people have heard of?
I want to avoid things like memoirs, clicky articles, wellness content, etc. Looking for something more direct and zoomed out and theoretical. I feel like that has to exist?
Edit: I wrote this thinking about how much Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory or some feminist writings I read in college unfucked my head with regard to those topics.
you may enjoy sections of Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics and it may be helpful to your efforts in finding people who write on this subject; here is one excerpt for example that i noted in my recent read-through of it:
Hell yeah this is exactly what i was looking for. Thanks
you may also enjoy Thomas Szasz on this subject and concur with some of his analyses about the validity of “mental illness” as a concept/what follows from accepting it as a concept (although i believe he was strongly right-libertarian and this informed some of his opposition to psychiatry as a practice–so you may wish to take or leave some of what he says consequentially)