A lot of recent studies in both psychiatry and psychology have shown they are not as hard-sciencey as they would like to be. Chemical balance as as cause for depression for example was recently dismissed. The definitions of the DSM are ever shifting and changing, almost as if they were made up - luckily they took the gay out of there as a disorder, thank you very much! I would say not all of it is a scam, and based on 19th century old white men’s weird ideas, but the whole of it is definitely only one model of the actual mental health landscape of people, and a very bad one at that.

I don’t dismiss the existence of mental health challenges. I don’t believe that we would all be mentally well in some imagined utopia. I have lived with mental health challenges myself all my life - probably on what is commonly called the ASD/ADHD spectrum* but undiagnosed because I wasn’t a boy. So I kind of slipped through the grid and had to figure things out for myself, and had to come up with uncommon adaptations. And that has indeed given me privilege or better said advantage compared with those friends and family who somehow got into contact with psychiatry and/or psychology. They were locked up, told the way they think is wrong, misdiagnosed, medicated with stuff that now in many cases proves to cause lasting damage in the brain, the list goes on. Most people I know who started medication for mental health issues continue medication, for all their lives, often with awful side effects that end up being way worse than the actual issue.

Plus, a lot (not all!) of the mental health services currently available are geared to ‘maintain’ people so they can withstand increasingly abusive employment situations and ever increasing financial hardship. That’s enabling abuse in my book, and I want no part of it. They could encourage a 4 day work week and liveable wages instead and see how people’s mental health improves.

• ASD/ADHD is one of those conditions where psychiatry/psychology has produced not much more than crude tools to handle us weirdos. Many of those of us who thrive do so by their own ingenuity/consulting with the ASD/ADHD community rather than any mental health service. That’s why I prefer the term Neurodiverse, or Neurofunky. I am not disordered. I have difficulties to thrive within the usual conditions of mainstream society where it gets too noisy or peopley, but do very well when not forced to participate in that. So what I would advocate for is not a system that tells us that we are disordered, but a system that creates conditions where we can be productive on our own terms. For example, I couldn’t work a full-time job in public, and that might make me disabled in many people’s eyes. But I’m not disabled, because I can be fully productive in a remote job where I only work a few hours a week, and I balance it by growing most of my own food. You could say I created my own little looney residence - and I am fully aware that I have been lucky and am very privileged to have created that for me. But this kind of thing is what I advocate should be available for people, not being forced into a noisy 9-5 job and then being told by a mental health professional that something is wrong with them.

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