Academic Antipsychiatry: Exploring Methods and Language of Psy Abolition in Mad Studies
Efrat Gold
Disability Studies Quarterly12/10/2025·DOI·Read paper
Abstract
This article explores antipsychiatry, and specifically the role of antipsychiatry within mad studies and the area’s use of language as a type of mad methodology. Through attention to language, and refusal to participate in dominant frameworks of psy naming, a degree of criticality is maintained simply by the act of naming otherwise. In unpacking antipsychiatry and the area’s commitment to avoid uncritical uses of psy language, I explore whether this commitment can provide methodological guidance, and what this guidance means for the relevance of contemporary antipsychiatry within mad studies. As a psy abolitionist position, I present that antipsychiatry can be re-imagined as a space within mad studies to preserve abolitionist work even as the field expands beyond critiques of psy hegemony. It is important to contend with the history of antipsychiatry as representing a professional-led critique against psychiatry precisely because it is an abolitionist position, and abolitionist efforts from within predominant institutions such as the university or psy complex merit interrogation. Moving away from distinctions based on self-identifications with madness that foreground lived experience as the primary form of legitimacy, a different distinction emerges: that between the professional vs. non-professional critic of psy hegemony. Naming the professionalized roots of antipsychiatry allows a shift in recognizing the role of the psychiatrized in the development and continuation of antipsychiatry theory and activism, calling into question the uses, limitations, and future of antipsychiatry and its relation to mad studies. I ground my exploration through the antipsychiatry commitment to avoid psy language and to name otherwise.
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