Dennis Fox’s Weblog

On the blog Anarchia, which I confess I found because it links to mine, I found this explanation of its name:

In the USA in the 1800’s, many people who opposed a centralised federal authority and criticised the government were diagnosed with Anarchia, which was defined as having an “excess of the passion for liberty” that “constituted a form of insanity”. So thats where the name comes from.

The political use of psychiatric diagnosis won’t surprise anyone familiar with critical psychology, but I don’t remember hearing about anarchia before. So reading this sent me searching, and soon I found a ZMag article from last year by clinical psychologist Bruce Levine, author of Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations, and a World Gone Crazy:

Two ways of subduing anti-authoritarianism are criminalizing it and pathologizing it and U.S. history is replete with examples of both. In the same era of John Adams’s Sedition Act, which criminalized criticism of U.S. governmental policy, Dr. Benjamin Rush, “the father of American psychiatry” (his image adorns the APA seal), pathologized anti-authoritarianism. Rush diagnosed those rebelling against a centralized federal authority as having an “excess of the passion for liberty” that “constituted a form of insanity.” He labeled this illness anarchia.

Historically, both direct and indirect resistance to authority have been medicalized and diseased. In an 1851 article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright reported his discovery of drapetomania, the disease that caused slaves to flee captivity, and dysaesthesia aethiopis, the disease that caused slaves to pay insufficient attention to the master’s needs. As with anarchia, few took drapetomania and dysaesthesia aethiopis seriously—but this was before the diseasing of anti-authoritarianism was accompanied by Big Pharma drugs and marketing blitzes.

While drapetomania has given way to ODD [Oppositional Defiance Disorder] and CD [Conduct Disorder], dysaesthesia aethiopis has given way to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The vast majority of kids  “with ADHD” are capable of paying attention and being cooperative in environments that they are comfortable in. Studies show that they will pay attention to activities that they have chosen, that they find stimulating, or for which they are getting paid. They routinely pay attention to what interests them but tend to blow off school, especially homework. In 1992 the then APA medical director proudly described the relationship between the APA and pharmaceutical corporations as a “responsible, ethical partnership,” and, in 2001, the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that four to six million ADHD-labeled U.S. kids were taking Ritalin and Ritalin-like drugs.

The rest of Levine’s article is worth reading. So is Anarchia.

Here’s a short review of Levine’s book by Mel Starkman in Radical Psychology Journal (published by RadPsyNet) and a 2001 interview with Levine in LiP Magazine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Anarchism, Critical Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.