Founded in the 1980s by the Salvadorian activist and psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró, it argues that we cannot isolate “mental health problems” from our broader societal structures. The UK could learn a lot from liberation psychology. Black people are more likely to be Tasered, sectioned, restrained and over-medicated than anyone else in our mental health services today. It is here that we fail marginalised people the most: Black people’s understandable expressions of hurt at living in a structurally racist society are too often medicalised, labelled dangerous and met with violence under the guise of “care”. They encourage us to adapt to systems, thereby protecting the status quo. But I worry that a purely medicalised, individualised understanding of mental health puts plasters over big gaping wounds, without addressing the source of violence. Individual therapy is brilliant for lots of people, and antidepressants can help some people cope. What’s most devastating about this myth is that the problem and the solution are positioned in the person, distracting us from the environments that cause our distress. Ironically, suggesting we have a broken brain for life increases stigma and disempowerment. In reality, recent research concluded that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain. In efforts to destigmatise mental distress, “mental illness” is framed as an “illness like any other” – rooted in supposedly flawed brain chemistry. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe.
As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress.
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