Rethinking women’s discomfort and psychiatric care from a decolonial perspective: contributions to an antiracist practice

• Main Author: Solis-Gomez, Susana Beatriz
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad de Alicante 2023
• Subjects: Feminismo; Decolonial; Psiquiatría; Antirracismo; Salud Mental; Malestares; feminism; Psychiatry; discomfort; antiracism; mental health; First Nations
• Online Access: https://feminismos.ua.es/article/view/23527

The premise of this article is related to the fact that feminist studies that have been focused on women and their relationship with psychiatry and the emergence of psychic discomfort or suffering, have done from a framework of analysis focused on the western-modern context. This has led to overlooking the analysis of the phenomenon in the case of women whose experiences do not correspond, or at least not entirely, to the Eurocentric logic, such as the situation of those who belong to afro-descended people and indigenous or first nations people. Given this, it is argued that a decolonial perspective allows us to critically situate ourselves before Psychiatry in it’s intertwining with racism making visible, on the one hand, psychiatric ideas and practices and the specific affectation of these to non western population, and, on the other, accounting for the relationship between structural conditions, crossed by the coloniality, and the emergence of discomforts. Apart from this, it makes it possible to achieve an analysis in epistemological terms that accounts for the particular effects of Psychiatry as a medical paradigm in the people who distance themselves from the Eurocentric logics. The article culminates with the presentation of contributions to an antiracist practice in the field of mental health. The article presents, first, a tour of the main feminist contributions to this field, to then describe, synthetically, the development of psychiatric practice, giving way, in a third part, to the application of a decolonial analysis of the elements described. It ends with the presentation of contributions to anti racist practice in the field of mental health. La premisa de este artículo guarda relación con la idea de que los estudios feministas que han abordado el vínculo de las mujeres con la disciplina Psiquiátrica y han analizado la emergencia de malestares y/o sufrimiento psíquico en estas, lo han hecho desde un marco de análisis centrado en el contexto occidental-moderno. Ello ha hecho que se pase por alto ...