Health Self Defense ❤️🔥😷Psychiatric diagnoses & bioessentialism will not liberate us, Ayesha Khan, Ph.D.
https://wokescientist.substack.com/p/psychiatric-diagnoses-and-bioessentialism
Some clarifications off the bat
I am writing this from the perspective of communities in the global south who have always had alternative modalities to conceptualize human and planetary distress without pathologizing it. Our communities have been/ are being killed for our cultural traditions including medicine. Many of us in the diaspora are struggling to rediscover, reconnect with, practice, and preserve our traditions.
If terms under the umbrella of neurodivergence are important to you, then know that I’m not asking you to abandon them, nor am I framing them unilaterally as “bad”. I’m asking you to look beyond them, to be aware of how they can be leveraged for harm and to recognize that there are other ways for communities to make sense of their distress without these labels. I’m asking you to embrace complexity and create space for it. The rest of the world should not have to speak this precise language. The language of colonial psychiatry should never have been forced upon the global south and it shouldn’t be today, including any reclaimed version within the neurodiversity framework. Most importantly, if we’re attempting to abolish colonial/ capitalist systems while building collectivist systems of community care then I think everyone has a lot to learn from alternative frameworks created, nurtured & developed by communities who have always been fighting for the health of the planet.
I also urge you to be wary of biological essentialism that sounds like “I was born like this, I’ve always been like this, this is just how my brain works”. The concept of neurodiversity has been heavily co-opted in the global north, watered down, individualized, sanitized and DEPOLITICIZED. People often frame neurodivergence as atypical brain wiring which is the same biological essentialism that gave us race science. Many movements and spaces in the global north have a tendency to turn to bioessentialism (for gender/ sex and sexuality for example). Categories and labels like autism/ ADHD etc, whether they are reclaimed & redefined or not, are all social constructs, not biological realities with clear boundaries, definitions and measurable criteria. Usage of these terms as biological categories can be harmful and prevent revolutionary progress as we try to reimagine community care.
As I began to see the structural and systemic roots of our distress, I increasingly moved away from “born this way” thinking. The more I prioritized intentional community building and reconnecting to my cultural roots, the more impossible it became to see my pain as separate from other people’s struggles. It’s all interconnected and psychiatric labels simply failed to capture these nuances that collectivist communities are built on.
The more I anchored into the collective, the less attached I was to even the redefined, radical derivates of these labels. The diagnoses that were always foreign to my community, imposed on us by our colonizers, were again feeling foreign to me. Though I see the power in reclaiming some things that have been used to oppress you, I don’t see the utility in everyone reforming and repackaging every aspect of colonialism. If anything, I see the global north’s obsession with spreading colonial models of mental health, including psychiatric diagnoses, to the the global south as being one wing of modern day colonialism.
Psychiatric labels AND the neurodiversity framework do not speak to majority of the people in my community or to majority of people in the world.
This does not mean that I think it is bad if someone is empowered by these labels. But folks in neurodivergent spaces in the global north need to think about the fact that they may have a lot to learn from collectivist communities who have always had all-encompassing, transformative, land-preserving, care systems. These life-sustaining approaches to medicine were violently destroyed or are currently undergoing colonial erasure. Colonized people are criminalized, punished and killed for attempting to continue their traditions.
Decolonizing also means letting go of bioessentialism
Maybe we shouldn’t assume anything of people who do or don’t carry a neurodivergent label. Maybe someone identifying as neurodivergent or NOT won’t help you understand much about them or circumvent the process of getting to know them with care, over time. Maybe we should let people open our world to new worlds.
Colonialism brainwashes people into thinking they are “individuals” or atomized beings separate from everything, separate from each other, the land, the trees, the birds and the rest of our kin. These systems have concocted ridiculous bioessentialist boxes and categories to convince us that we are alone, separate, distinct, and unrelated.
