A Myth in Creation

“The maddening ambiguity of our position is what leads to the titular psychiatric psychodrama. One cannot reconcile oneself to psychiatry because it constantly pulls in two directions – it presents one with an ideological narrative that speaks of humanism and pluralism, and a material structure that witnesses biomedical hegemony. At some level this profession just does not make sense to itself, its own ideology out of whack with the plain facts of its own existence. There are those who are tempted to focus only on the positives, and see in this a story of triumphant progress towards a scientific future. And there are those who are inclined to see in it a story of eternal recurrence, single message mythologies ever reinventing themselves. But both of these perspectives are too tidy to capture the phenomenon. For this story is of a profession in contradiction with itself.” The above passage is a modification of a particularly memorable paragraph from Liam Kofi Bright’s brilliant article