Table of Contents
What is the Medical Industrial Complex?
"The Medical Industrial Complex is an enormous system with tentacles that reach beyond simply doctors, nurses, clinics, and hospitals. It is a system about profit, first and foremost, rather than “health,” wellbeing and care. Its roots run deep and its history and present are connected to everything including eugenics, capitalism, colonization, slavery, immigration, war, prisons, and reproductive oppression. It is not just a major piece of the history of ableism, but all systems of oppression." - Mia Mingus, 2015
Psychiatric Abolition/Policing in Mental Health Care
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Some background on psychiatric abolition
- Psychiatric abolition: the eradication of the carceral system in which peoples with developmental and/or psychological disabilities are incarcerated, isolated, and oppressed. Psychiatric incarceration includes psychiatric wards in hospitals, some mental health centres, and prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centres.
- The psychiatric abolition movement first began to receive traction in the radical Black and brown organizing community in Toronto in the early 1990s, where some began to use the term “psychiatric survivor” to describe the depth of trauma and abuse they survived under psychiatric institutionalization This movement of anti-psychiatry questioned the authority of medical professionals, drawing parallels of surveillance and power differentials in the medical industrial complex and the prison industrial complex (Bracken & Thomas, 2001) Many psychiatric survivors shared in experiences of over-medication, solitary confinement, and physical restraints of psychiatric prisons.
Psychiatric Survivor's Pride Day
- The organizing of the first Psychiatric Survivor’s Pride Day included hospital demonstrations with hundreds of attendees, as well as workshops and educational sessions that focused on tenants' rights, policing issues for psychiatric survivors, the closing of homeless drop-in centres and changes to family benefits legislation (Finkler, 1997). These demonstrations gained international coverage, prompting many lawyers and medical professionals to contend with their own harms, as well as the existence of a community often institutionalized and separated from the public.
History of Asylums and Mental Health Institutions