Wake Up Bradford!

A Review of an Article Entitled:

What the Anti-Psychiatry Movement Got Wrong About Mental Illness;

by Madeleine Ritts in Jacobin,14^thMarch 2022.

available at

https://jacobin.com/2022/03/anti-psychiatry-movement-mental-illness-psychological-suffering#:~:text=Madeleine%20Ritts.%20The%20anti-psychiatry%20movement%20advanced

Simeon Scott

Given the stresses of living in a society dominated by the wage labour system, some of those living in Bradford may be interested in the state of their mental health. Writing about the “various forms of mental distress and disturbance that people can experience”, Ms Ritts offers what at first sight appears to be a well balanced survey of both mainstream psychiatric theory and practice and the views of its “leftist” critics. With reference to “poverty, inequality, economic precarity, and experiences of violence or abuse” and more, crucially she asks: why does the impact of these “travails” vary from person to person? Pointing out that “not everyone who lives on a low income is depressed, and not everyone with depression has a low income”, Ritts is critical of those, often “well meaning”, “leftists” who focus “exclusively” on the social causes of mental illness. As with physical illnesses, she is surely correct in arguing that we are all different and are likely to react in a range of ways to similar sets of circumstances. Although Ms Ritts acknowledges the financial and ideological links between mainstream psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry, along with “the corrosive ethos of competition and atomisation of life under capitalism”, she nevertheless insists on mainstream psychiatry’s “scientific path of incremental progress”. However, as is often the case, it is not what Ritts says in her article, but rather what she omits to mention that is of most importance.

Let us begin with a mention of the American publication in which Ritts writes: Jacobin. Whilst we can only speculate as to the political affiliations of Ms Ritts, we should be aware that the name Jacobin refers to a group of middle class intellectuals who sought to take over France following the 1789 revolution. Basing themselves on the Jacobins, following the coup of 1917, the Bolshevik leaders Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin set up a new mode of production in which the one party state owned and controlled the means of production. As a result, Russian workers had no choice but to rent out their labour to state managers who introduced tortuous piece rates and, along with high levels of industrial accidents, this no doubt resulted in psychological trauma for millions of workers. After the death of Lenin, like the Jacobins before them, the Bolsheviks began to murder each other, coupling this with the mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants and others in the 1930s, Ms Ritts might well have used the term psychopath to refer to the members of the Bolshevik central committee. All in all, the trauma unleashed on the working class of the USSR would be difficult to exaggerate; with the result that alcoholism, suicide and low life expectancy were, and remain under Putin’s rule, a commonplace. All of this raises the question: to whom is Ms Ritts referring when she writes of “leftists”? Perhaps it is to some of the French intellectuals of recent decades, her use of the fashionable cliché “narrative” suggests an affiliation to post-modernism. If she is referring to supporters of Xi’s China or even North Korea, there are many such supporters around, then she surely needs to discuss the trauma resulting from living in a totalitarian society, as describeded in Orwell’s1984.

Ritts could have mentioned the films of Ken Loach, such as Family Life and Kes, which deal with a range of relevant mental health issues. These include childhood trauma with regard to the perils of living inside a nuclear family, bullying by school teachers, the issues arising when workers claim state benefits, job insecurity and more. That Ms Ritts makes no mention of the malign effects of the systematic religious brainwashing of children, Internet addiction and the psychological effects of the Covid lockdown is, let us be honest, unforgivable. She does mention the closing of mental asylums, but fails to indicate the relevance of the rich not wanting to pay the taxes that could be used to fund all manner of better health care agencies. As things stand, so called ‘care in the community’, begs the question where is the community to offer the care? My home city of Bradford, in the north of England, offers one ‘answer’. The streets of the city centre are overrun with people with obvious mental health issues; drug and alcohol addiction, begging, people rooting through waste bins and rough sleeping are a commonplace.

Ms Ritts might also have mentioned the extent to which having no social conscience, referred as a sociopathy or psychopathy, predisposes a person to become a business-man or -woman or indeed a career politician. We could further mention the opposition of General Practitioners and Consultants to the setting up of the British National Health Service (NHS) in the late 1940s; for the simple reason that many felt they could make more money in a regime based on private health care. As things stand in Britain, as elsewhere, it is easy to obtain a therapist, as a middle class professional, if you can pay; otherwise you join a queue for care by an overstretched therapist employed by the NHS or a charity. Finally, caring little for the plight of those obliged to participate in the perils of the wage labour system, with little or no legal or trade union protection, getting the sick back to work is a priority for Britain’s new so-called Labour government. Come on Ms Ritts, you can do better than this!