Making a New World: Chapman on What We’re Doing and Who is Included in the Project

F or at least some of us, Chapman’s Critique of Critical Psychiatry represents an in fact long overdue articulation of the moral and ethical risks (and in harm) of the Szaszian legacy in critical psychiatry. Namely, a binary framework that bluntly differentiates “somatic” from “psychological” (or, for some, socially manufactured) conditions. Chapman articulates these risks in important ways—unpacking, for example, implications vis-à-vis broader disability groups, identities tied to neurodiversity, and the transgender community, among others. Implied, but less explicitly stated, are the ways in which an objectivist, Szazsian politics plays out even within and among (psychiatric) service user/ survivor activists, namely in the de facto erasure of sustained and complex (functional or as Chapman terms it, cognitive) disability. At times this has figured in arguments premised on the manufacture of disability through iatrogenic intervention (what we think of as long-term psychosis as in fact a biological condition brought about by sustained neurological damage from neuroleptic drugs, for example), and the commensurate claim that in the absence of such interventions, conditions like psychosis would either resolve on their own, or represent an opportunity for “spiritual transformation” (Grof & Grof, 1986). Without in any way downplaying the realities of either iatrogenic harm (which in fact cuts across all areas of medicine) and a range of experiences, some transient, spiritual or otherwise transformative, the problem remains the fate of those whose disabilities are in fact far-reaching and all too “real.” In many national contexts, including the United States, these are the individuals most likely to end up institutionalized, transinstitutionalized, incarcerated and/or relegated to a life of extreme poverty and political disenfranchisement (e.g., Cohen, 1993; Ramsay, Stewart, & Compton, 2012; Reiter & Blaire, 2015; Schoenbaum et al., 2017). Olufemi Taiwo’s cautions regarding elite capture, and it’s