rantz Fanon spent much of his life in hospitals, as a worker, writer, and patient. Much of Fanon’s work examined hospitals as institutions of social control, medicalising criminality, and exercising colonial powers. To Fanon, ‘colonialism in its essence was already taking on the aspect of a fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals’ – creating the social conditions that enabled the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, and in turn, the need for institutions capable of housing and controlling the ‘sick’.
By now there is enough criticism of the mental health business out there that it seems to me most engaged readers have been informed about the problems: psychiatry makes a false equivalence of the brain and the person, psychiatry pathologises some of the normal problems of human life, psychiatrists enforce highly constrained norms of thought and behaviour, and psychiatrists don’t value patients’ autonomy. There is still however a lot of confusion about the status of the things that psychiatrists treat. These are by no means illnesses, and the medications doctors use to treat them are by no reasonable measure effective.