When Mental Illness Is Used For Oppression

How can we reform the mental health system for justice?

His early experiences as a psychiatrist gave him the revered ideas in his later texts, a lesson to us that mental health services were once used to oppress the colonized.

Stevens reflects to when he first discovered Fanon’s work, when he was training as a psychologist in South Africa. He was encouraged by a group of black psychologists to “engage with the emancipatory potential of Fanon’s approach to mental illness,” as during the time, time, Fanon’s work was not mainstream. Now, in universities across the world, they are.

Although mental illness is obviously a real and devastating experience for many people, Fanon expanded the conversation to how society and culture influenced it. He thought that it was possible for madness to be linked to contradictions in colonial and post-colonial societies, and especially the relationship between the individual and the social structure, when the social structure is oppressive.

It is no secret to us that oppression still happens today — in America as well as the rest of the world. The George Floyd protests across the country have illustrated that.

Fanon realized that, in his experience with non-French speaking North African patients, he could not understand their perspectives due to not understanding their language. He started to realize the importance of language “as a central feature of cultural revitalisation and agency,” according to Stevens. Meaning is made through language, and the key to…

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