Entirely incomprehensible

Phyllis Chesler has a Tablet piece on - well you decide. I suppose it's about peddling woke nonsense within institutional psychiatry. Not an unfamiliar problem in a wider sense, but it does remind us that nonsense can be useful in erecting academic barriers. Not that many people would wish to climb these barriers.

I began the research that led to my pioneering work, Women and Madness, 53 years ago. The book challenged institutional psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis. Thus, I was especially interested in attending the opening panel of Barnard’s 47th Scholar and Feminist Conference on Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing. The panel was titled “Willful Subjects*: Decolonizing the Psychiatric Institution.”

With some exceptions, the speeches were entirely incomprehensible.

The whole thing is worth reading as a reminder of just how far down the rabbit hole it is possible to go in academic circles. All the way then further than that seems to be the answer.

Although the speakers employed a pseudo-Mandarin language meant to impress, dominate, and silence, I was nevertheless able to comprehend this much: They argued for the destruction of boundaries and borders of all kinds; viewed chaos as “liberating” and “revolutionary”; and tended toward romanticizing “madness.” While I initiated the view that psychiatric diagnoses can certainly be stigmatizing and punitive in ways that are sexist, racist, and classist, I have never romanticized psychological suffering as “liberating” or “revolutionary.” It is, rather, a trip to hell, one never chosen...

I must admit: I understood very little of what the second speaker, Dr. Emily Ng, said. Her study was based in China. She did not criticize totalitarian communism, Maoism, the mass murder of many millions, the ongoing genocide of Uighur Muslims. She spoke about “ghosts,” “spirit possession,” and “mediumship” versus “diagnoses.” While China was never “colonized,” she still wanted a “cosmo-political universe” that was more “porous.”