A Disorder for Everyone

The ways we think about psychiatric drugs may be harming us more than they are helping us

By Shannon Brault

Fourteen hours of challenging the culture of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs and exploring trauma-informed alternatives is what “A Disorder for Everyone” is all about. 

“A Disorder for Everyone” is a series of events based in the UK that offer a chance to discuss and critique the biomedical model of mental health. These events have moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic and are hosted on Zoom.

I went to the “A Disorder for Everyone” event on Sept. 18 where there were poetry readings, artistic presentations, presentations from trained professionals, speakers from organizations challenging the narrative of biomedical mental health, and stories from survivors of abuse both within and outside of the psychiatric system. When I logged onto Zoom for the day, I was met with a music video to a song called “Bad Things and Happen” by James and the Disorders, which was a fun way to start out the webinar. 

While some of the artistic presentations, like the music video, seemed like a more light-hearted way of discussing the topics at hand, other speakers and presenters throughout the day shared raw stories about their trauma while presenting informed alternatives, or calls for informed alternatives. 

I appreciated the incorporation of slide shows, research,  interview videos, music videos, and personal art to make the atmosphere one where it encouraged vulnerability and connectivity, even though it was a webinar for most of the day and you were not directly engaging with other people. The chat function on Zoom was also open, so people sent supportive messages when others were sharing their personal stories of trauma and their experiences with the current psychiatric model of labels and drugs. Even though the event was based out of the U.K., people were attending the webinar from all over the world. This gave the event a feeling of a large community where there was mutual understanding, despite the distance between us. 

The event left me with questions on how we could take the information from the event and put it into practice halfway around the world. The event emphasized the critical fact that the voices of those who are being treated are not listened to. Psychiatry has a history of undervaluing and dehumanizing individuals with mental illnesses. The legacy has continued to put labels on people for what is “wrong” with them, which leads to stigma and shame. 

Another aspect of the event was the discussion of psychiatric drugs and their effectiveness. One of the speakers, American journalist, and author, Robert Whitaker, spoke about the need to challenge the idea of psychiatric drugs, labels, and diagnoses. Whitaker explained that when drugs came into the market, they were seen as an antidote. Whitaker said the drug trials were biased in favor of the drugs, and the recovery rates were not getting any better with the drugs on the market. Whitaker also said that diagnosing lists are arbitrary and lead to arbitrary diagnoses. 

Another speaker, Laura Delano, co-founder and executive director of Inner Compass Initiative and The Withdrawal Project, which are organizations providing safe and trustworthy information about coming off of psychiatric drugs, shared a more personal story of going on psychiatric drugs as an early teenager and trying to come off of them years later when she was an adult. She shared that coming off of drugs is often figuring out who you are outside of the diagnosis that you have been given. It was reconnecting with a sense of trust within herself. 

Whitaker further argues that putting a label on someone makes it the individual’s problem and not society’s problem. Labels shrink people to something that is “wrong” or “different” with them and make it difficult for them to navigate the world. It takes the focus off of the environment in which the mental illness manifested, and puts the blame on the individual with the diagnosis. As both Whitaker and Delano argued, we need to create better environments. They argued that we need to create environments in which people are free to be themselves and environments where people aren’t afraid to feel pain. As Delano said, we shouldn’t fear pain, but listen to it and create the change we need from there. 

The event left me with a better idea of how we can help other people with trauma, and how they can heal with it. Psychiatric drugs are often prescribed when a psychiatrist reaches a diagnosis, and in many cases that is the only information and aid given to them.  Psychiatric drugs have a tendency to numb people. They make people more subdued and less themselves. The event reinforced my belief that psychiatric drugs are not antidotes, but sometimes they can help. When you break your leg, you need crutches to walk, and sometimes you need a mental crutch too. 

This event and the work that “A Disorder for Everyone” does is important in understanding other people’s trauma, and how we can better interact with one another. We are more alike than we are unalike. We all go through different experiences in life and see life differently, but at the same time, if we sit down and listen to one another and listen to other’s trauma, we will find that we understand and can relate in different ways. Labels can reduce a person down to a singular aspect of something that is “wrong” with them, and it makes it difficult for us to really understand each other. 

With mental health being a topic of conversation that has been more widely accepted, this event, and other events that “A Disorder for Everyone” holds, is a great way of hearing both the voices that are affected by harmful practices in psychiatry and the voices that are trying to change the narrative. I would recommend this event or any of their other events. We need to change the way we speak about mental illness and further push for trauma-informed alternative solutions to better help individuals affected by trauma, mental illness, and abuse.