The Identity of Psychiatry and the Challenge of Mad Activism: Rethinking the Clinical Encounter.

ABSTRACT

Central to the identity of modern medical specialities, including psychiatry, is the notion of hypostatic abstraction doctors treat conditions or disorders, which are conceived of as "things" that people "have." Mad activism rejects this notion and hence challenges psychiatry's identity as a medical specialty. This article elaborates the challenge of Mad activism and develops the hypostatic abstraction as applied to medicine. For psychiatry to maintain its identity as a medical speciality while accommodating the challenge of Mad activism, it must develop an additional conception of the clinical encounter. Toward elaborating this conception, this article raises two basic framing questions For what kind of understanding of the situation should the clinical encounter aim? What is the therapeutic aim of the encounter as a whole? It proposes that the concepts of "secondary insight" (as the aim of understanding) and of "identity-making" (as a therapeutic aim) can allow the clinical encounter to proceed in a way that accommodates the challenge of Mad activism.