Racialized and migrant people are especially vulnerable to mental health problems. The social hatred established as racism creates trauma, weakness, anxiety and guilt, which results in a greater number of admissions to psychiatric hospitals.
Oppression, aggression and violence are practices that affect the mental health of the people who suffer them and it is a fact that they occur in all manifestations of racism, both institutional and social, enhancing mistreatment, isolation and personal distress. In particular, it manifests itself in racialized and/or migrant people, who are especially vulnerable to mental health problems.
The social hatred established as racism creates trauma, weakness, anxiety and guilt, which results in a greater number of admissions to psychiatric hospitals. The lack of support networks, alienation in a hostile Western country and the difficulties of living make migrants more likely to enter psychiatric hospitals than locals, in terms of the proportion of the population.
The construction of “mental illness”, which varies according to the historical, social, political and cultural context, has resulted in the creation of psychiatric techniques that have become instruments of social control. However, since its beginnings, psychiatry has also been a convenient tool for disguising the racism of science.
In the book by the XarxaGam collective Otra Mirada al Sistema de Salud Mental there is a revealing connection between psychiatry and racism: “Already in the 19th century, the scientist Samuel A. Cartwright, in the United States, invented two mental “illnesses” related to the established racism of the time. One was “drapetomania”, which was based on the supposed mental “illness” suffered by black slaves who had the desire and longing for freedom, translated into attempts to leave or feelings against slavery. The other “disease” that was invented was “aethiopic dysaesthesia”, which created a disorder of insecurity among the slaves in order to carry out their work. The cure for both ailments was tinctures.
Doctor Carothers, an expert at the World Health Organization in the 1950s, stated that “Africans use their frontal lobes very little. All the particularities of African psychiatry can be attributed to a frontal loss”. Thus, he stated that “the normal African is a lobotomized European”.
In the context of the struggle for Algerian independence, Frantz Fanon, in Los condenados de la tierra (The condemned of the earth), faced with psychiatrists“ declarations that ”the colonizer's reticence to entrust responsibility to the indigenous is neither racism nor paternalism, but simply a scientific appreciation of the biologically limited possibilities of the colonized“, he states that ”the criminality of the Algerian, his impulsiveness, the violence of his murders are not, therefore, the result of an organization of the nervous system or an originality of character, but the direct product of the colonial situation".
It is clear, therefore, that historically the relationship between psychiatry and racism began very quickly. What's more, today, as a result of a colonial system, the most repressive institutions such as psychiatric institutions, CIEs, juvenile centers and prisons, all institutions in which human rights are vulnerable, are filled with racialized and migrant people.
In conclusion, we affirm that the struggle for mental health cannot exist without the anti-racist struggle because, as we have seen, racialized and migrant people are more likely to be victims of psychiatrization and all the coercive institutions of the state.
In this context, we invite you to take part in the demonstration that will take place next November 17th against racism. It's been three years that we've been moving to show that we are many people who want to build a society for all, that migrant and anti-racist power will not stand still in the face of those political forces that seek to confront us from below, we won't allow it, we'll see you on November 17th.