Commentary The “Mental Health Crisis” and the Non-Being of the Mad

In response to state-sanctioned police violence, movements like BLM and calls to “defund” or “abolish the police” suggest that funds currently used to fund the police would be better mobilized for “mental health services,” particularly for historically and presently minoritized peoples. Not only do these calls ignore the role mental “health” services play in neoliberal societies, but they also overlook the historical roots of psychiatry and the role it played in the systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments. The incarceration, sterilization, and, in extreme cases, killings of certain parts of a population were often justified in terms of protecting and strengthening the nation, and the productivity, efficiency, and defense of the community, the colony, and the military. Psychiatrists, nationally and internationally, were the “experts” who constructed “madness” and identified “invisible” (genetic) risks, rendering some men and women undesirable, unproductive, dangerous, and, in some cases, not worth living. Nowadays, the dominant discourse on psychiatry in Western societies is that the asylum is an institution of the past, and that we are living in an era of deinstitutionalization of psychiatric asylums. This discourse assumes that we have reached a point where the “mentally ill” have rights and are treated with dignity and exceptional measures are only deployed towards “patients” to protect them or others. The psychiatric system is supposed to help people in distress, but the reality is quite different. In short, psychiatry has always been linked to questions of the life and death of psychiatric patients, defining who was a/normal, which lives deserved to be lived, and which deserved to be forgotten or killed. In our contemporary societies, psychiatry's obsession with a/normality translates into the exclusion and systemic execution of parts of the population, defined as Blacks, Indigenous, the poor, people considered of deviant gender/sexuality, etc. The ontological position of the mad as “non-human” has been the basis of (and continues to legitimize) a scientific psychiatric biopolitical rationality, including the politics of death which infuses it.