Drop the Disorder!: Challenging the culture of psychiatric diagnosis

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Would they have thought I was healthy if I constantly defied authority, had no conscience, and was promiscuous? I hope it’s not too hasty to say that this book might be one of the most influential on my journey as a counsellor and I’m incredibly grateful to have come across it while still studying. Others come with crippling anxiety and a parallel belief that it is something that is part of them, that their brain is dysfunctional and they have no control over it. Yes, stick a label on it assign the corresponding drugs , it’s all mapped out , no thought required. As this patient looked me in the eye with what took considerable effort to fight the level of sedation they were under, they asked me… “What can you actually do for me, how can you help me, you look like a teenager, how can you help someone of my age, how can you understand what I’ve been through?

I hear and read everywhere: ‘I AM [fill in the manufactured psych diagnosis]’, and ‘I HAVE [fill in the manufactured psych diagnosis]’. This of course makes no philosophical sense as there is no psychotherapeutic theory that is compatible with the medicalisation of distress! All of this is a treasure trove of resources and knowledge–all I can do for those around me is to educate them and prove to them that I can make it without psych drugs.In my opinion, therapy should be a place where concerns central to antipsychiatry (if one is has issues with psychotropics) should be safely presented, articulated, and processed. If Close ever wound up with the psych label of “schizophrenia” she would find out that the word was very meaningful indeed.

And with that in mind, I feel it might be worthy to continue this review aligned to the personal storytelling theme from the book within my own story. The appetite for challenging the mainstream narrative was huge and by March 2020 we had taken our AD4E day event to 21 cities around the UK and involved many contributors in the process.

Anyone who wants to deal with the epidemic of distress and despair in our society should engage deeply with Jo Watson’s work and this massively important book. it also helps me understand where some of my frustrations in the more recent awareness of mental health manifest. a question that encourages the framing of distress as an understandable reaction to trauma, adversity, or just the struggles we all face as human beings in a difficult world.

However, I hope the people involved are arriving from all political worldviews, otherwise it will devolve into just another groupthink, echo-chamber community. by Jo Watson questions the entire concept of pathologized diagnosis by examining the consequences and social construction of distress. However, I have been moved by the thoughtfulness and warmth people have shown to each other as they share feelings, experiences and dilemmas about working in, and being on the receiving end of, the psychiatric system. This is exactly the message that the self proclaimed “holistic psychologists” have been spewing as truth for decades now, especially the “holistic” psychologists who like to profiteer off of covering up sexual abuse of small children for the religions, like my former psychologist. As such it marks a refreshing and pivotal departure from the dominant ‘illness’ narrative we have come as a society to accept unquestioningly, and to impose on other cultures.

I guess I would say I hope other movements crop up with suggestions for future movement, in addition to cutting down a very bad system. So, I was particularly educated by the way the book encouraged the reader to explore who would be negatively impacted, and were that change to be brought about. This book brings together psychologists, counsellors, psychotherapists and users and survivors of services to propose answers to these questions.