Most people have no idea what violence the mental health system has done to and is still doing LGBTQAI+ people. In this book queer people tell their truth about a system that wants to hide it.
The majority of books in mental health archives and libraries are written by professionals, the survivor or patient voice is not allowed to carry any weight. Why should the people who’ve never visited a land be that country’s prime historians, like lions representing bird song in roars. This book is letting the birds sing, offering the chance for survivors to finally write themselves into existence.
‘Queerphobia and the mental health system’ is an important and powerful collection, highlighting the ways in which accepted mental health understandings and practices frequently damage and re-traumatise LGBTQIA+ people by replicating and reinforcing wider cultural norms and injustices. Editor Dolly Sen has done an excellent job of bringing together a diverse range of voices, covering various intersecting oppressions, forms of madness or distress, and modes of engagement with mental health systems across generations and locations. The accounts are often achingly sad and utterly enraging. They are also frequently beautiful, profound, and funny as hell.
It is horrifying to reflect on the continued harm done by a culture – and the systems with in it – which insists on imposing limiting hierarchies and categories on diverse bodyminds, experiences, desires and practices, creating a ‘them’ to position and defend against, instead of engaging compassionately and curiously with fellow beings. Hopefully this vital series of books will help many to feel less alone as we see our experiences reflected, enabling us to resist the constant pressure to individualise our struggles and turn against ourselves. Much mad queer gratitude to Dolly and to all those courageous enough to include their stories in this inspiring collection. – Meg-John Barker, Author of Queer: A Graphic History
“Dolly Sen skilfully brings together a wonderful array of LGBTQI+ psychiatric survivors to re-claim experiences, identities and stories that have been pathologised through mental health systems. As a result, Queerphobia and the Mental Health System powerfully demonstrates how Gay, Trans and Mad oppression is deeply entangled – and suggests that so, too, is our individual and collective liberation”. – Hel Spandler, Professor of mental health, UCLan and Editor of Asylum: the radical health magazine
“This is a very powerful collection of stories, narratives, experiences from LGBTQAI+ people writing about the mental health system. They are raw and honest and brave. Some of them are truly shocking, not entirely surprising to those of us with some personal experience, but shocking nevertheless. There were a couple of moments when I almost had to look away, the resonance was so powerful. I have been to some of these places but certainly not all of them. I hope many people read this collection, people who are mental health practitioners as well as people with lived experience, to see what happens to some people who are so othered in society that their identity becomes a part of their pathology when they seek help when in mental distress.”
Alison Faulkner, Survivor Researcher
“This is a collection of compelling, moving and shocking personal accounts of LGBTQ+ people’s experience in the mental health system. These narratives, long overdue, demonstrate how sexual orientation, gender identity and personal history play a key role in our experience of mental health assessment, treatment and ongoing care. This book will provide an original and excellent resource for mental health professionals and carers.” Dr Clare Summerskill, Writer, lesbian stand-up and singer songwriter.
“This book amplifies the voices of those that are so often marginalised and pathologized within heteronormative mental health services. In systems that desire collusion, you will find the experiences and stories of those that are not prepared to be silenced anymore. An essential read for those that crave authentic, unapologetic experience, over academic textbook.” Dr Brendan J Dunlop, Principal Clinical Psychologist, Clinical Lecturer and Author of ‘The Queer Mental Health Workbook’
It is in the telling and in the hearing of these stories, cries from the heart for a understanding and celebration of queer beauty. I’ve have seen first-hand over three decades the endemic abuse and ridicule of queer people in mental health units.
This is a glorious though not an easy read. They are a harrowing critique of psychiatry and of counselling / psychotherapy, of discrimination and of ignorance and a lack of understanding, with the construction of the pathological from personal narrative, and the misconstruing of identity as disorder.
One can only hope the handbook might be the start of a bringing of light to this culture of abuse, and start a fundamental challenge to the notion of the saviour-healer-therapist-psychiatrist, smug and deaf in their knowing of mystic psychological arts, towards a more human and humane coming together of people for healing.
For those with lived experience of the services, these accounts should bring solace in solidarity. For professionals, they should raise the urgency of addressing their systemic and internalised fear of difference and diversity because the shame is theirs. Dr David O’Flynn, Adamson Collection Trust