A Quickie on Antipsychiatry

Bonnie Burstow is a professor at the University of Toronto's pit of vipers called 'Ontario Institute of Studies in Education' (OISE). She is prolific author, researcher, 'professional feminist psychotherapist', and is considered to be one of the world's leaning anti-psychiatry theorists - I suppose this bodes poorly for the plucky little discipline.  

This may seem like a odd thing to worry about. After all, anti-psychiatry isn't taken too seriously outside of Scientology, but... The University of Toronto has offered the first ever scholarship in Anti-psychiatry Studies up to $50,000, annually since 2016. This is funding of activism, and the fundamental assumptions of the activism are incoherent and flawed in numerous ways.

Burstow and her ilk partake in the dubious, though well-meaning enterprise of anti-psychiatric activism which took off in the 1960's with the work of Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, among others. 

Following in the footsteps of such thinkers, Burstow attempts to problematise the medical concept of 'mental illness' by stating that 'illness' is a term denoting anomalous physicality, while mental denotes processes of the mind which are not physical. So, the mental, which is not physical, is being used as though it were physical, and this is incorrect; a ‘bizarre use of language’ - a metaphor. 

The criticism of linguistic sloppiness is fine and all, but I think the distinction being drawn between the mental and physical is too simplistic and, as such, results in a host of further issues.

While arguing that 'mental illness' is a mistaken term because the mental is non-physical and illnesses only affect the physical, Burstow will say that we ought to think of the mind as a verb. It is a verb that has been reified into an object, an object that is then studied by experts who impose their own morality on the individual possessing the mind under investigation. To Burstow, the mind is an activity of the brain. That's a fair position to hold, but if it is an activity of the brain, then why can there not be illnesses of the mind? I see no reason why not.

There is a spectrum of illnesses, diseases and disorders that there are recognised to have biological and psychological components – influenza and syphilis are but two examples. In fact, there is a lot of work going on regarding how to identify and address illness with some prominent researchers stating that mental disorders need to be addressed as disorders of distributed brain systems with symptoms forged by developmental and social experiences. It is also recognised that environment and social experiences play a large role in the development of a human being and these effect gene expression. So, there is a lot of intermixing of the brain and the mind, as it were. I think that a lot of the nuance is being left out here, and I think that has to do with a conception of strong dualism between the mind and body, a position that isn’t all that tenable now given the onslaught of scientific and philosophical arguments and evidence.

An other, and truly bizarre argument from Burstow and other is what I call 'the Argument from the Corpse'. In this argument, Burstow states that illnesses of the body have symptoms and effects that linger in the sufferer's body after death - when a person dies of cancer, the cancerous cells are still present, for instance. Since she knows this, she asks where does schizophrenia go when a schizophrenic dies? This is supposed to be some kind of refutation of the reality of mental illness since mental illness, if they were illnesses as she conceives of them, would remain in the body.

This is baffling because one can ask, 'OK, where does the mind go after death?' Is the absence of mentality after death a refutation of the existence of the mind? Even if she were to bite the bullet and go full epiphenomenalist - holding the position that the mind is non-physical and it exists, but doesn't do anything; like the heat coming off of a computer - then she’d still be in hot water because the barrier between the physical and mental would be obliterated, and thus mental illnesses would just be illnesses of the brain. Sure, but then she is just arguing semantics and it doesn't amount to a substantive criticism of psychiatry.

This is an affront to science, philosophy and the medical research into mental disorders. Science and philosophy are supposed to represent us at our epistemic best, and the activism of folks like Burstow are hardly up to the task of mounting a full-throated and detailed attack on the fundamentals and principles of the psychiatric disciplines. At best these arguments are committing the genetic fallacy and at worst are committing category errors. In either case, the scholarship is a disgrace and a sign of the anti-science Left's seeping into the academy ever the more so.