Reddit reviews Toward Psychologies of Liberation (Critical Theory and Practice in Psychology and the Human Sciences)

If you aren't already referencing it, Mark Fisher wrote a great piece making pretty much the same argument a few years before his death.

https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841

Our societies are profoundly alienating, and any attempt to build solidarity among the downtrodden has been crushed before the people threaten the powerful. What is more emblematic of a system that exclusively values capital than the owner class ruthlessly exploiting the labour of the masses, while simultaneously profiting from their misery.

Not all of psychology ignores this problem. The subdiscipline of critical psychology is entirely focused on the social and cultural etiology of disease. Unfortunately, it's far from a mainstream movement. My hope is that as more millennials enter the mental health field, the perspective of those of us who came of age in the shadow of the 2008 financial collapse will push the mainstream to address the role of society in individual distress.

If anyone wants a primer on critical psychology, I'd suggest Towards Psychologies of Liberation. It's not a thrilling read, but it's a great introduction to the field.

Preaching to the choir. The history of psych in the states is a hilarious clusterfuck that keeps on fucking, and you get all kinds of people defending it as this bastion of medicine.

There is some backlash within the field (psychologies of liberation is an amazing book), but there's no external rights movement I know of aside from the usual anti-capitalist stuff highlighting how fucked it is. Zasz and his scientology friends don't count. You have to do your own digging or be privileged enough to get into a grad school.

Bosch still applies

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2010/20101004/bosch.jpg

It is nice, however, to see someone else with the same opinion. Having an entire predatory industry on your back with no one else on your side can be hellish.

> I'm pretty sure we should leave that distinction to actual, trained professionals.

this is a terrible idea if you're expecting to mete out justice based on that metric. unfortunately, this is a technocratic stance with all of the bad shit that goes along with it. trained mental health professionals have massive blind spots. If you're poor, an anti-authoritarian, queer, an immigrant, etc. you are going to have serious problems trying to find a professional who actually understands these issues. Add to that that diagnosis is a subjective process. You could literally see 10 different professionals and get 10 different diagnoses.

one common example of some of these problems is that a ton of them claim to work with "lgbt issues," but when it gets right down to it, they have no fucking clue what they're doing. that honestly usually just means they read a few chapters about lgbt issues back in school and they're not completely grossed out by queer people.

punishment should not be the goal anyway. you're thinking completely like a liberal here. what we need is community-oriented methods of repairing social wounds. leaving it up to a doctor who sees you maybe once in order to determine whether you should be punished (just...why?) is totally nonsensical.

sometimes people are too great a threat to society so you deal with them, like nazis. most of the time this isn't the case and there are ways of mending wounds. Punishing people does absolutely nothing. there are books written about communistic means of dealing with social debts and ills and reformulating systems of justice--and some of these are from a psychological perspective. I recommend this book personally. it primarily deals with psychology, but it does get into leftist ideas of justice from a stance that isn't completely derived from liberal ideas of punishment and pathology. Foucault also wrote extensively on the subject.

the justice system is shit. recreating it is idiotic.