Sylvia Marcos - “An Introduction to the First Conference of Radical Alternatives to Psychiatry in Latin America”
*Editor’s Introduction
In Cuernavaca, at the fourth Alternatives to Psychiatry Conference in 1978, the Mexican journalist and critic Carlos Monsivais declared that Mexico had been turned into a “grand divan.” The country’s embrace of orthodox Freudianism, he continued, was a product of its hypnosis by a “bourgeois prophet of social adjustment that replaced class struggle with the image of a collectivity obsessed with the inner perfection of the individual.” Encouraging a turn away from Freud towards Wilhelm Reich and a subjectivity free of the Oedipus complex, he ended his talk quoting the Cuban writer and poet José Lezama Lima: “desirous is he who flees from his mother.” [1]
Monsivais was responding to the bevy of psychosocial experiments that proliferated in Mexico, as elsewhere, throughout the 1970s. Mexico had closed its largest mental hospital, the La Castañeda asylum, in 1968, and shifted psychiatric care to its distributed “granja-hospitals” on the outskirts of the capital. At the same time, a general preoccupation with mental health saw behaviorism, psychoanalysis, sociocultural theories of human behavior, and new age spirituality attending to a common set of social and economic changes. Particularly in vogue was an orthodox Freudianism championed by the country’s most powerful analytic society, the Mexican Psychoanalytic Association, or APM. On a cultural level, this produced crude attempts at psychoanalyzing Mexican society; APM founder Santiago Ramírez, for instance, suggested in his book El mexicano: Psicología de sus motivaciones, that aggression towards the pregnant mother could be detected in the tradition of hitting piñatas.
Where the aforementioned approaches fell short, for Monsivais and those attending the Alternatives to Psychiatry Conference, was the absence of politics in their analysis as well as a lack of recognition of the dangers of the psychiatrization of everyday life. In what would be the first of two conferences organized by the Network for Alternatives to Psychiatry in Mexico, those present in 1978 saw themselves engaged in a fight against “the transformation of society into a grand psychiatric hospital,” and psychiatry’s complicity in developing more expansive forms of exclusion and social control. “The only alternative to a society that makes social, political, and economic marginalization its golden rule,” declared conference coordinator Sylvia Marcos, “is to integrate the problematic of mental health into the field of politics.”
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The emergence of the conference arcs back years prior, when on an afternoon in Cuernavaca, shadowed by the volcanoes of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, the young Mexican psychologist Sylvia Marcos found herself attending a seminar by Franco Basaglia, the director of the San Giovanni psychiatric hospital in Trieste. He spoke of the efforts they had made within the asylum: eliminating straitjackets, opening up cells, and opening up the walls of the asylum itself, which had resulted in seven violent instances involving inmates in Trieste and legal trouble for Basaglia. A few days after the seminar, they sat sipping coffee with colleagues late into the night while Basaglia recounted the struggles of the Italian Democratic Psychiatry movement. Despite Marcos’ inability to understand his garbled mix of Italian and Spanish, he clocked her enthusiasm and invited her to come visit the San Giovanni psychiatric hospital. [2]
It was 1974, and Basaglia was in Cuernavaca to speak at the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), a university and think tank that recruited many of its students from the countercultural current running through the United States. [3] Founded in 1965 by Ivan Illich, an Austrian Catholic priest, the CIDOC was a secular offshoot of the Center for Intercultural Formation, a language school and missionary training program that Illich had established in 1961 with a loan from Fordham University and a grant from the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. [4] Cuernavaca at the time was already a hub of progressive Catholicism and Illich, whose theological influences included Thomas Merton and liberation theology progenitors Gustavo Gutierrez and Sergio Mendez Arceo, had his own intentions of discouraging missionary work in Latin America while maintaining the front that he was running a training program to his Catholic financiers in North America. He understood his position to be subversive: “I did my best, in other words, to keep development-obsessed do-gooders out of Latin America.” [5]
Offering courses on indigenous medicine, Leninism, social theory and pre-columbian history, the CIDOC, with Illich’s celebrity status, attracted figures such as Susan Sontag, Paulo Freire, Che Guevara, Roberto Rosselini, and Ernesto Cardenal. As a faculty member, Sylvia Marcos taught classes on gender and Mexican history while conducting her own clinical work with women in Cuernavaca. Illich himself gave weekly seminars and brought in other thinkers to speak, like Basaglia, whom Illich admired and cited in his 1974 book Medical Nemesis. In addition to the CIDOC, intellectual culture in Cuernavaca received contributions from the concentration of intellectuals from abroad (Erich Fromm was Ivan Illich’s neighbor), as well as the progressive experiments with Catholicism in the city (such as the benedectine monk Gregorio Lemercier, who famously conducted psychoanalysis within his monastery until faced with the threat of excommunication from the Vatican).
In Trieste, Marcos saw the experiments of Democratic Psychiatry up close. The reforms Franco Basaglia and his wife Franca introduced at the psychiatric hospital in Gorizia between 1961 and 1968 accelerated the movement towards deinstitutionalization and the closing of asylums. When Basaglia later assumed the directorship at San Giovanni in 1971, the number of patients decreased from 1,182 to 625 in 1974. [6] Those formerly interned in the asylum were given cash assistance and housing. As he greeted her on the outskirts of the psychiatric hospital Basaglia told Marcos the telos of the project in Trieste: “My task, and the task of everyone interned here, is to destroy the asylum.”
Through Basaglia, she also made contact with the Network to Alternatives to Psychiatry (Réseau-Alternative à la Psychiatrie). Responding to a shift in psychiatry from the asylum to the “secteur” (in France) or the “community,” the Network understood itself as a hub of thought and support for the local groups that were trying to transform psychiatric services at the time. Their own analysis sought to synthesize the link between psychiatry and workers’ struggles and transcend the dominant psychiatric discourses of the time:
“For us it is not a question of obtaining a tolerance for madness, but rather of making it understood that madness is the expression of social contradictions against which we must struggle as such. Without the transformation of society there is never a 'better psychiatry' but always an oppressive psychiatry.”[7]
Marcos was to attend the first conference of the Network in 1975 in Brussels and subsequent conferences as the Latin American coordinator. She met Network founder Mony Elkaïm, whose noninstitutional work with family therapy at the Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx saw him liasing with the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. In Brussels, she met with Félix Guattari, another founder of the Network. Recounting the nature of their initial friendship, she recalls her own work on traditional medicine in Mexico and that Guattari “had gotten a contact in the Unesco about traditional African medicine and wanted to work with me on this project, to study or make contact between two points, Latin America and Africa.”[8] She was impressed by Guattari’s ability to apprehend transformations within capitalism as augurs of changes in subjectivity. “What I have discovered is that Félix’s ideas have incorporated themselves into my thinking; now I’m unable to disentangle what I believe, what I think, from what influences I received from his thought.” [9]
The next Network conferences would be held in París, in 1976, and in Trieste, in 1977. Titled “The Circuit of Control,” the 1977 conference was staged under a large circus tent on the grounds of the San Giovanni psychiatric hospital. Some four thousand people gathered to socialize and attend workshops, films, exhibits and presentations with some of the larger names of the conference: Franco Basaglia, Félix Guattari, and David Cooper. On the opening day, two mimes wearing tails and bowler hats stood out from the crowd and began to imitate the presenter. This act of guerilla theater transformed into shouting and sloganeering as some 30 local autonomists and militants wearing black cloaks from the French-Belgian group Marge escalated the action from a protest to an occupation of the administrative building of the psychiatric hospital. [10] Jesting “We want Basaglia as director of Asinara” (a maximum security prison in Sardinia), they called for an expansion of Network’s focus on psychiatric marginalization to other forms of marginality such as the houseless, the unemployed, sex workers, and homosexuals. [11] Anne Lovell, in her report on the conference notes that “the provocations did bring home to us the constant reaffirmation that psychiatry is not a neutral science but a political ideology.” So too was it evident that if society locks up its weakest subjects and calls them sick, bringing these people back into society from the asylum is insufficient if the base problems of social exclusion via income, work, housing and dignity are unaddressed.
Other contributions were made by conference attendees. Yves-Luc Conreur, a Belgian man who had been interned several times, spoke from the authority of the psychiatrized and underscored the connection between marginality, exclusion, and exploitation: “We reject magical forms of conduct, we reject artificial and voluntary misery, mysticism, suicide and madness as forms of liberation. We reject the demand by certain psychiatrized people to be exploited like everyone else. It is not a matter of having more rights in hospitals but of destroying the asylum and the logic of the asylum which has spread throughout our society.” Links to repression abroad were established as a Latin American political exilé spoke on the psychological damage of being forced to leave home while one’s “comrades are tortured with sensory deprivation, pharmaceuticals, and electroshock.”[12] So too would those in attendance notice a gesture of Italian solidarity with Chile on a foreboding mural, painted on the walls of a vacant ward. A bulking, black toothed machine closes its mouth on the word: CHILE. On the machine is written: PEACE TIME CRIMES.
A year later, Basaglia inaugurated the 1978 conference in Cuernavaca by calling for unequivocal solidarity by those of the network with the Nicaraguan revolution: “It is a moral commitment to give all our support to the people of Nicaragua.” In a nod to the efforts in Trieste to address other forms of marginalization, Basaglia also declared that “misery is where psychiatry is born” and that “our struggle is not inside, but outside the institution.” These efforts to go beyond the asylum to its surroundings are resonant with others in attendance, among them David Cooper, Marie Langer, Félix Guattari, Mony Elkaïm, Franca Basaglia, and Carlos Monsivais.
The 1978 conference would mark the official emergence of the Latin American branch of the Network. Denouncing the dependence in Latin America on the frameworks of the behaviorism of the United States and the Lacanianism of France, Marcos declares:
“The objective, then, is to search for our own answers through the awareness of the cultural colonization we are and have been historically subject to in order to rediscover and rework that which allows a real and concrete approach to people and their social, economic, political, cultural and historical situation, which will give us the tonic for truly popular action in our countries, autonomous, and not derived from blind compliance with foreign frameworks.”[13]
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In English for the first time, we present Sylvia Marcos’ 1981 introduction to the fifth conference for the International Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry. The second meeting in Cuernavaca doubles as the first meeting of the Latin American Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry, which later conferenced in Brazil (1983) and Argentina (1986). Marcos’ introduction weaves together national liberation movements, psychiatry, and autochthonous Indoamerican epistemes with an urgency given to the link between the work of the Network and political struggle: “We cannot wait for the fight against the asylum to later fight against the social marginalization that feeds these institutions. We cannot wait until the fight in El Salvador is victorious to, only after, give our support to the fight in Guatemala.”
Those present at the 1981 conference included Félix Guattari, Robert Castel, and Democratic Psychiatry members Franco Rotelli and Antonio Slavich. Additionally, representatives from Mexico, the United States, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Peru, El Salvador, Argentina, Guatemala and Spain were also in attendance. Missing was Franco Basaglia, who had died of a brain tumor the year prior. Presentations reviewed the situation in psychiatric hospitals and communities of various countries in Latin America and additional sections of the conference were organized by sections on political repression and psychological techniques, the particularities of the oppression of women, and more.
Sylvia’s introduction outlines the stakes of the conference as well as the interventions that the Latin American branch of the Network was trying to make. The text foreshadows the increased place of pharmaceuticals in psychiatry while denouncing the use of psychiatric, psychological and psychoanalytic techniques in the repression of political dissidents in Latin America. In this moment of social and political repression the “confrontation with the institutional system surpasses the psychiatric sphere and enters into the domain of social structures that sustain it.” - N.L. Perla
Sylvia Marcos - An Introduction to the First Conference of Radical Alternatives to Psychiatry in Latin America”
This meeting presents many important conjunctures. For one, it's a forum where participation occurs within the wide spectrum of technical power, represented by all of us who are professionalized: psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts–and those who have suffered from our medical or psychological work: the formerly abused Mexican or American patients that will take the floor to speak to their own struggle. We are here, oppressed and formerly oppressed; those who fight for themselves and those of us who want to be accepted as their collaborators. We need autonomous forums where the psychiatrized, the marginalized, women, homosexuals, and the various oppressed can speak to our struggles without savior mediatizations.
The organic cerebral damage caused by psychiatric drugs, expressed frequently through the symptom called Tardive dyskinesia (involuntary movements of the muscles of the knee, arms, tongue, cheeks and lips) is the product of one of many abuses of psychiatric power that will be analyzed by our friends Leonard Roy Frank, Wade Hudson and Fred Masten, rights activists of mental patients in the United States.
The death of patients interned in psychiatric hospitals, suffocating while eating and/or through vomiting contractions in that moment, allows us to see clearly the way in which the marginalized and oppressed in the system are inclined toward torture and death.
It is inevitable to remind ourselves of the situation of political militants in Latin America. Oppression expands itself; conduct must be controlled, both that of the deviant, dissident of daily life, and that of the dissident of the social macrostructure, the political opponent.
The methods do not differ. Psychiatric technology (electroshocks and drugs), psychoanalytic technology (identifications, transferences of paternal figures) and psychological power (operant conditioning via the application of reinforcement and punishment), they are all represented in the documents from the workshop Torture, Repression and Exile in Latin America. The increasingly sophisticated use of these techniques to better extract information and to torture is outrageous beyond expression. It's urgent to denounce and reject the use of our technical role–questionable in itself–as a technology of political control and as a means of destruction.
The colleagues in Guatemala will analyze this utilization in the implementation of a regime of terror, in the hands of the thugs: psychological techniques are forms of torture that not only seek to extract information, but paralyze the action of many dissidents and political fighters in our brother nation.
We say no; an energetic no to electroshock “therapy” in an asylum concentration camp and a no to its application in camps of political detainees in Uruguay, Chile and Argentina. No to massively administered drugs to the dissidents of daily life in the granjas of Mexico and no to the wave created by this method to torture and extract information in Bolivia and Brazil.
No to power utilized in the therapeutic relationship of analyst-analysand, a subtle and disguised power that serves not just to cure a neurosis, but also to manipulate the filial love of a poor latin American woman to give up and betray her adherence and fidelity to a cause.
No to operant conditioning. No to the consequent reinforcement of cigarettes, sweets, and other bribes, given to the miserable psychiatric interned, the socially marginalized of “good conduct” to get them to talk, to laugh and eat in these abysses of extortion, violence and involuntary confinement that are the granjas and psychiatric hospitals and the so called “Centers of Social Protection” in our country... and no also to sexual stimulation as a means of breaking the “deviant” conduct of a friend imprisoned by the cronies of a Latin American military regime.
The collusion of these situations is unjustified.
Between the colleagues tortured by psychiatry in totalitarian institutions, as analyzed by Erving Goffman (1) and the colleagues tortured in concentration camps, prisons, etcetera, in Latin America, Italia, etcetera, there is a nexus. What is this nexus? Are we prepared to see it? Are we able to combine our critiques? Are we able to reinterpret the madness of the social outcast? Are we able to verify the real madness of a behavior controlled by the apparatus of power? Control exercised in the wide range that goes from interpreting a small quotidian gesture as a “deviation”–such as a new diet or a grown beard–, to the demolition of self-evaluation, achieved by the psychoanalytic strategies applied with the goal of breaking the secret of popular and clandestine organizations.
Our objective is to encounter this nexus.
We converge here as militants of different origins: leftist militants, some psychiatrists by profession, that perhaps have not discovered their complicity with the apparatus of power through the control exercised upon the dissident of everyday life, the “psychotic,” and colleagues of survivors of psychiatric oppressions (“Survivors of Psychiatric Assault”), that perhaps have not perceived that their fight has inscribed itself in the fight for radical social change.
The abolition of these relations of the oppressed with the oppressors, of the exploited with the exploiters, is not achieved without radically altering our social, economic, and political structure.
The fights for revindication by women for the appropriation of their own bodies (privileged terrain of social, legal and political expropriation), for the right to have sexual preferences, for the right to take ownership of modes of healing like traditional medicine, may seem like “minorities,” secondary and/or even perhaps banal to militants of macrosocial revolution.
The fight of the socially marginalized, of homosexuals, of “minority” ethnicities, is in reality the fight of a numeric majority who are minorities in power. We can’t continue to call social groups that are enclosed in spaces designed by the minority apparatus of power “minorities.” Those that are denominated explicitly “majorities” are, in fact, “minorities'' with power.
The reappropriation by the so called “crazy” of his physical and social body, of his common space, one of the revindications signaled by Franco Basaglia and the analysis of relations of power and networks of oppressions, studied by various colleagues of the feminist struggle, further substantiates our demands.
We want a future revolution in our continent to include the change of social relations. Our fight is channeled in two directions; it is a dialectic, it is a process. We don’t look solely for macrostructural change or solely for institutional or interpersonal change. In effect–as Basaglia said–, “our action has developed itself through a dramatic and oppressive reality that can only be rejected violently. The subversion of that oppressive reality can not be realized without a radical polemic as much in relation to what is wanted to be negated as to the values that stimulate and perpetuate the existence of such reality. Thus, our anti-institutional, antipsychiatric (anti-specialty) discourse can not limit itself to the specific terrain of our field of action. The confrontation with the institutional system surpasses the psychiatric sphere and enters into the domain of social structures that sustain it, obliging us to critique scientific neutrality–which tends to the maintenance of dominant values–to transform them to political action.”(2)
Franco Basaglia was not just an Italian political figure. His impulse in Latin America generated a struggle that we can’t relinquish. He belongs to all of us: mexicans, brazilians, colombians, argentines, to all those who beneath his creative and political force have developed our positions and begun to fight in our continent. The colleague, the friend, the teacher. His political insight and flexibility have permitted his influence to extend itself far beyond Italian borders. His optimism in practice, the support that he brings to our initiatives, made the movement belong to the world and not just Europe. The importance of his work resides in the possibility of repeating it, not just in clumsy imitation, servile and repetitive, but in the autonomy of a movement that knows that “it is unable to be imitated,” that each historic, social, political, and institutional context offers different conjunctures, different possibilities. In Brazil, the increasing denunciation of the growth of the number of services and psychiatric hospitals as sites of death and torture; in Colombia, the open hospital of Boyacá–the Basaglian Method, as they call it; in Mexico, the alternative propositions to the institution in the region and the denunciations of hospitals as sites of reclusion and social protection.
The destruction of the institution, a product of repression and social control, guarantees the real and symbolic marginalization and exclusion of “dissidents.” “Social peace,” based in class society, proscribes, criminalizes, and psychiatrizes the expression of all human attitudes and needs that oppose power and the norm imposed by the dominant ideology.
The concept of institutional destruction makes evident that the problem of the asylum isn’t encountered solely within its walls, but primarily outside of them, given that society is the one that produces madness and also excludes it. The difficulty resides in finding concrete responses to the concrete demands that arise from the reality in which it operates, “reality” which is ideologized, that is to say, falsified in the sense that it doesn't correspond to the concrete, or, as Marx would say, to the practically true, but as product of the methods taken by the dominant class that imposes them and acts as instruments of domination.
Mental illness, according to this logic, is incurable or incomprehensible, its principal symptom is danger or obscenity and, therefore, the only scientific response is the asylum, where it is treated and controlled. This axiom coincides with another implicit one: the norm is represented by efficiency or productivity; whoever does not respond to this will find themselves in a space that does not hinder the “rhythm” of work and daily life.
The problem of the definition, treatment, and circumscription of mental illness in Latin America is colored with particular dyes.
The socially marginalized encounter themselves, above all, outside the asylum. The phenomenon of disintegration, destructurization, oppressive and repressive control have transformed themselves into the social rule of immense marginalized majorities.
Hunger is the “illness” par excellence; a hunger accumulated that reduces the nutritional necessities. Hunger couples with inhalants in gangs of children on the street, hunger added to frequent births, hunger that promotes “mental debilities,” and organic damages, apathy and listlessness.
The “sickness” of hunger is not only a technical problem: it is a political problem. The true illness is the cancer of a social structure that dismisses the majority and later creates a scientific psychiatric “system” of etiquette to blame the victim of the deformations that this very unjust system provokes. As Latin American psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists we reject this idealization of misery in our continent. We reject the scientific complicity that is baptized as “cerebral damage” or “mental debility” , a suffering that is personalized in concrete subjects but that emanates from the unjust distribution of wealth.
Hunger in Latin America is related with other pseudo-psychological problematics: sociopathies (prostitution, robbery, violence, criminality).
The prestigious Manual of Psychopathologyby Millon signals: “The sociopath has learned few ways to socialize to cope with frustration.” Frustration appeared minimalized, conceptualized as “another frustration:” that of the child that eats well and desires a toy but is denied, that of the middle class man that hopes for a better position in his job and doesn't receive it. Frustrations and more frustrations have been part of the material of analysis of conflict psychologists. The “intolerance of frustration” is the guilt of the subject that must know to accept his limits and the limits of his situation, of the social and political context that surrounds him.
What possibilities of revolution remain with this ideology of acceptance? And, above all, what concrete political action involved wanting to name “intolerance of frustration” as the conduct that robs and sells its own body to survive? This “symptomology” has been defined as a “group of symptoms characterized by the disdain of responsibilities and social conventions.” The subject, the miserable, the unemployed, the piled up, still have–in agreement with classic psychopathology–the obligation to respect social conventions!
As Latin American psychologists we reject the use of psychiatric, psychological, or psychoanalytic terminologies to name the effects of the exploitation of hunger and the massacre of our continent. But neither can we fall into the easy trap of devaluing the poor, of considering them, in addition to miserable, as a trash bin of all psychological flaws; delinquent, violent, lazy, drugged, dishonest, irresponsible, prostituted. It would be the most sophisticated and subtle way to finish underestimating and dismissing the marginalized, the peasant, the indigenous.
Furthermore, there is more in Latin America than permanent hunger; more exists than the destructive and generalized effects that deplete brain tissue through chronic malnutrition. More exists than robbery and systematic violence to expropriate surplus that is later accumulated; more exists than prostitution and the degradation in the grand belts of misery and in the peripheries of large cities such as Lima, México, São Paulo, Bogotá, or Rio.
Flagrant contradiction! There exists in Latin America an incredible wealth of valuable remnants of historical eras, of social values and previous cultures: concepts of time and space, languages, social institutions, interpersonal relations, medical-religious beliefs.
To interpret, and, above all, to transform our reality, we need to perceive this cultural wealth. “Indianidad” is massacred on our continent.
We can’t deprive our continent of candomblé, of voodoo, of shamanism, of autonomous therapeutic action, to the margin of institutions. And this isn’t about a “return” to the past, but a revision of the synthesis between the minority’s own values and of some of the majority with power.(3) We intend to propose them as emergences of the popular classes and peasants, as forms of evading institutional marginalization and asylums, hospitals, etcetera, as social and communal “treatments.” To deny these values is to make oneself complicit with the dominant ideology, that despises all that it segregates. Our critique of isolating repressive institutions in Latin America must contain another pole: the acceptance and appreciation of autochthonous Indoamerican methods to the solution of madness, delirium, psychic suffering.
The dilemma is presented to us again. In Latin America, where marginality, the “limited situation,” occurs outside the asylum, where the asylum finds itself in the miserable peripheries of cities, in peasant villages dying of hunger, must our anti institutional fight then take place outside?
It would be to again enter into the logic of a linear system, adialectical.
Struggles are not counterposed against each other, they are linked through the same logic of marginalization, of intolerance of difference, of normalization, of repression. The struggles against the asylum and against social, ethnic, cultural and sexual marginalization are one and the same. Our program and our workshops have sought to bring forward this continuity. We don’t want to analyze one without analyzing the other. One survives because the other supports it. Without a link between different struggles it is not possible to destroy the segregational patterns that are the essence of the dominant ideology of capitalist society. We cannot wait for the fight against the asylum to later fight against the social marginalization that feeds these institutions. We can't wait until the fight in El Salvador is victorious to, only after, give our support to the fight in Guatemala. Reality is dialectic, the fight must be as well.(4)
The concepts of normality-anormality, of health-sickness, reveal the same contradictions. There exists organic damage, mental debilities, misery, hunger, prostitution, robbery, pharmodepedency, clinically labeled social phenomena. But there also exists communal capacities and groups lost now in the middle class, positive family relationships for the subjects that live them, medical systems less imposing and authoritarian, less technocratic, more communitarian and social.
What does “normal” mean in our continent?
The “normal” considered is also heavily political. The “normal” is the ecstatic. In all of us we recognize the bourgeois sociologic interpretation from which our psychological and psychoanalytic sciences emanate.
All concepts of normality that are proposed in our theories are static. They imply the immobility of beatitude. A detailed study is still to be done of each of the models put forward as the epitome of health: genital character (Freud), productive (Fromm), etcetera, to unravel the ideological implications inscribed in their presuppositions. In other cases, the lack of a definition of the “healthy” allows one to find the “adaptation to society as such” as a symptom of normality. The manipulative technicians of the modification of conduct are able to be gathered here.
Without making specifications through psychological trends, I believe we can signal some constant characteristics.
The immobility of the concept of mental health is evident, regardless if it comes from the most absurd reductionism, from a concept of mental health as a product of neurophysical biochemical reactions. In this way, chemical products have been proposed to resolve social problems. If one is anguished for the cause of unemployment or economic instability, someone must give him pills; if a woman is distressed because her husband beats her, one must give her pills.
The absurd treatment with psychotropic drugs emanates from a no less absurd concept of what constitutes health-normality: a zombie being, always productive, always well–I’m OK, you’re OK–without cycles, without anguish, without alterations, as if the social did not affect the subject at all, as if it was that of a well oiled screw that turns and turns, always efficient, to allow the immense machine of human exploitation to continue existing.
One of the latest publications of North American organic psychiatry proposes the control of biorhythms. These biological rhythms clearly influence our emotional states at a purely biochemical level. North American psychiatry is afraid: it proposes lithium to control the so-called manic depressive and also to control biorhythms. With that philosophy, it is feared–and the proposals have been listened to–that the use of lithium is mass distributed through basic foods to achieve a “happy world,” a universe of roboticized zombies and machines. This is the ideal of “mental health” that comes to us from the north american apparatus of power, our neighbor country. It is clearly a political goal. The inhabitants with their “harmful biorhythms” nullified will no longer have the energy to oppose wars like Vietnam or, much less, the collective massacres carried out by their henchmen in El Salvador, in Guatemala, in Nicaragua; they won’t have energy to reject the sale of arms, to oppose the training of white guards in Colombia, in Brazil, or in Mexico. They will always feel calm, pacified, even though their military machine works to wipe out entire populations from the map. Yes, “mental health” has nothing to do with politics! Yes, science is objective and pure! Yes, lithium is a marvelous “cure!...”
I would like to propose:
In a society like ours where the norm is extortion, the expropriation of the rights of majorities, where they are marginalized efficiently to control them through schools, madhouses, asylums, where the networks of oppression have reproduced themselves from the relations of political power to micropolitical and interpersonal relationships, where torture and massacre exists, that “mental illness” be conceived as a permanent state of struggle to alter the prevailing order. Mental health is able to be conceived only as the intersubjective satisfaction of the one who always fights without respite, even at the cost of feeling scared and anguished.
Cuernavaca, Morelos, México
October 2nd, 1981
(1) Erving Goffman, “Internados”, Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires, 1970.
(2) Basaglia, Scritti II 1968-1980, editada por Franca Ongara Basaglia. Einaudi 1982.
(3) See Toynbee, “A Study of History” cited by Franz Baro in “Asi Buscamos Rehacernos”, CELADEC, Brussels, 1980.
(4) See in F. Guattari “Molecular Revolution.” Paris, 10-18, 1980, an inspiring approach between micropolitics and the macrosocial.
Editor’s Note Footnotes:
[1] Carlos Monsivais, “Las Variedades del Mexico Freudiano, in Antipsiquiatria y Política, trans. N.L. Perla (Mexico City: Editorial Extemporaneos, 1979), 155.
[2] Sylvia Marcos “En Recuerdo a Franco Basaglia” in Manicomios y Prisiones (Mexico City: RED ediciones, 1981).
[3] The CIDOC distributed their catalog in California and took out advertisements in newspapers in San Francisco, Berkeley, Palo Alto, and at Esalen in Big Sur. Illich had this to say about the bohemian North American students: “The North American who believes that his New Consciousness entitles him to charity from northeast Brazilians, who believes that his interest in Castaneda permits him to disturb village life is, in a way, an even more subtle pest than the conceited Peace Corps members I saw ten years ago”
[4] Todd Harch The Prophet of Cuernavaca (New York City: Oxford University Press), 39.
[5] Ibid., 44.
[6] John Foot, The Man Who Closed the Asylums (London: Verso), 338.
[7] Reseau, “Statement of Purpose Concerning the International Network” in David Cooper, The Language of Madness, 1978. Retrieved here: https://www.reseau-alternative-na.net/statement-of-purpose
[8] Ana Caroloina Patto Manfredini, “Sylvia Marcos, la amiga de Felix Guattari.” Retrieved here: https://sylviamarcos.wordpress.com/2017/03/31/sylvia-marcos-la-amiga-de-felix-guattari-sobre-politica-clinica-y-amistad/
[9] Ibid.
[10] Marge (Margin) was a French-Belgian anarchist group that brought together criminals, sex workers, ex-prisoners, drug addicts, transexuals, and squatters.
[11] Paolo Hlacia, “Reseau 1977.” retrieved from: https://www.storiastoriepn.it/wp-content/uploads//2024/05/RESEAU-1977.pdf
[12] Anne Lovell. “Breaking the Circuit of Control. A Report on the Conference of the European Network: Alternative to Psychiatry.”
[13] Antipsiquiatria y Politica, 222.