r/PsychotherapyLeftists

I'm hesitant to ask this specific question because most people aren't disabled and can't relate. But I felt more comfortable asking a more progressive group. Fingers crossed.

How do you feel about therapists wearing masks during sessions?

I have a neurological disorder that causes tremors throughout my body and muscle contractions in my face. I wear a mask everywhere I go to avoid being harassed and humiliated.

I'm just nervous about being deemed "unprofessional " in session. But I don't want my movements to distract clients.

My therapist told me to unmask during sessions but she has a radical mindset. I'm trying to keep clients on my schedule so I can get paid.

Any comments telling me to get a different job will be blocked, deleted and reported. That's not a option rn.

I think we’ve all seen how therapists have raced to labeled themselves as “trauma-informed” over the past several years. Moreover, the IFS-informed model of the frightened inner child has become a popular framework for understanding the struggles of adulthood. There’s something nefarious going on here that isn’t unique to therapy.

For the past several decades, the “youth market” has become an extremely profitable and politically useful commodity across industries. The premiere archetype created by the music, film, and fashion industries has been the “rebel without a cause.” Young people, who feel misaligned with the systems they born into, who are at the highest risk of attempting suicide, are framed as, at best, misdirected.

This goes hand in hand with the perspective the mental health industry has adopted on trauma, particular youth trauma. Our disordered behaviors may not be “immoral,” as perhaps they once were deemed, however they remain inncorrect responses to one’s present state of being - they are trauma responses.

Trauma is retrospective. I rarely see it considered as ongoing - it always happened in the past. It doesn’t take sides. It’s not anyone’s fault. And it’s the responsibility of the victim to figure out how to live with it rather than prevent it.

Trauma sharply differs from abuse. Abuse would require a perpetrator. Abuse is an injustice that might require action. And if we identified similar patterns of abuse across an entire society, an aggressive or radical response might not be a dysfunctional behavioral at all.

While traumatized people are useful to our institutions as relatable, yet static, images of frustration and suffering, an explicitly abused and wronged population justifies the kind of radical action that industries like the mental healthcare system have never endorsed.

Has anyone ready Psychoanalytic Liberation Psychology by Nick Malherbe? Care to share your thoughts? Comments? Criticisms?

I’m a first year graduate student and am in a psychodynamic class and also an integral yoga/multicultural counseling class. I’m finding myself having a hard time connecting to psychodynamics so far (only really have gone over some Jung, Freud, Winnicott, and this week Kohut). There’s pieces of psychoanalytic theory and depth psychology that I feel passionate about and want to incorporate into my practice one day, but there’s also a part of me that is so disgusted by the history of psychoanalysis and its complicity with injustice and capitalism that it’s preventing me from wanting to better understand psychoanalytic theory beyond what I currently know now (which is pretty surface level but still feels powerful.) ESPECIALLY when it comes to Jung. I know he’s extremely foundational to depth psychology, but I can’t get myself to give AF about what he has to say because of how much of a horrible person he was and how all his theories were built through a lens of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

Anyone else have moments like this in graduate school? I’ve started looking for literature that incorporates anti-capitalist liberation psychology and psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic theory and it seems like the Nick Malherbe piece I’ve mentioned is a good place to start.

Thanks in advance!!

Alright here it goes again because mods called my post low effort.

Essentially I study graphic design and I am currently writing my thesis on Antipsychiatry, Mad Liberation and Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient movements. Now you might wonder why I am writing a thesis on this within the field of graphic design?

It’s because I think it’s very important and close to my heart and I’m very tired of the dispersed movements and non-understanding of our struggles in a broader context, so I am theorising that it’s a communication issue and unfortunately that we have fragmented our own movements that overlap in many ways.

Essentially I am talking about these movements in terms of a broader context of hermeneutical injustice, where the language or the collective understanding might be fragmented and therefore does not bring epistemic justice to the collective that have experienced horrific things, but also in terms of testimonial injustice where the subject is rendered irrelevant as a knower due to judgement on their identity as a subject. Further into communication theory, Habermas made a theory comprising of the ”public sphere”, which by Habermas was understood as a way to shape society by having a group of people assembling and forming ”common sense” or consensus. But other communication theorists have argued that there are people that historically and contemporaneously have been excluded from the public sphere and therefore formulated the theory on ”counterpublics” which constitute smaller collectives outside of the conception of the public sphere which can establish their own ways of communication and recognition of one another, such an example would be that at some point the notion of ”sexual harassment” did not exist, and this was formed by counterpublics within women’s circles until it spread into the public sphere.

Now I am applying this theory onto psychiatric survivors, mad people, consumers, ex-patients and so on to bring more accessible counterpublics and hopefully establish a wider recognition to these struggles.

In this search I now have to find a more general symbolic and visual language that can be used to express these zines that I’m planning to make as the actual graphic design part of the thesis, so where can I find this? Are there any symbols associated with us? Any images? Videos? Pop culture? Games?

This is my most urgent question, the second question is, how can I do this fairly and do you have any ideas or want to contribute somehow? My idea is to make some resources on psychiatric drugs, institutionalization, poems, history, stories, radical psychiatry, movement explanations and differences.

TLDR; I am writing a thesis in graphic on antipsychiatry, mad liberation, consumer/survivor/ex-patient movements, I need help finding visual resources and symbols for my zines that will be the visual product. Any other recommendations or ways to go about this and what I could contribute with in these zines?