By Zenobia Morrill, Mad in America, August 3, 2021
“Colonial thinking runs deep in psychiatry” is the premise of a new open access paper that was just released in Anthropology and Medicine. A group of psychiatrists from the Critical Psychiatry Network (CPN) argue that decolonizing the field requires genuinely confronting and rooting out the racist assumptions at its core.
The team, led by psychiatrist Pat Bracken, propose critical thinking strategies for decolonizing psychiatric curricula and the knowledge/power structures in mental health. They welcome the recent statements by the American Psychiatric Association and the Royal College of Psychiatrists admitting to psychiatry’s appalling historical practices. Bracken and colleagues note that the beginning of decolonization process involves a “full interrogation of psychiatry’s history and its in-built assumptions and practices”:
“If we are to confront the current challenges that face us as psychiatrists, we must acknowledge the way in which psychiatry has played a role in the suppression of indigenous healing systems around the world, how it was complicit in the justification of slavery and colonisation and how profoundly a particularly ‘Western’ mind-set underscores its deepest assumptions and theories.”
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