Bonnie Burstow and Nick Walker - An Introduction to Cognitive Liberty
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2017
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Mad in America editor Emily Sheera Cutler presents the first in a series of interviews that examine the many important issues around forced treatment and cognitive liberty. The series will examine philosophical, theological, and sociological perspectives on coercive treatment.
In this first part, Emily interviews two well known and very respected academics and activists Bonnie Burstow and Nick Walker. Central to both Bonnie and Nick's work is the concept of cognitive liberty or freedom and integrity of the mind. Early proponents of cognitive liberty have defined it as the right to control one's own consciousness and be free from mind-altering drugs and technologies, as well as the right to use mind-enhancing drugs and technologies without facing legal consequences. Contemporary proponents of cognitive liberty have expanded the definition to include the right to experience and express each and every thought, feeling, state of mind, and belief as long as it does not harm anyone else. Both Bonnie and Nick describe cognitive liberty as the right to express oneself authentically. In this first episode, they get to the core of why so many human rights activists oppose forced treatment – it can interfere with people's rights to be themselves.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Bonnie became an antipsychiatry activist and scholar, and why she sees the institution of psychiatry as a human rights violation
- How Nick became a neurodiversity scholar through his involvement with the Autistic rights movement
- The difference between the neurodiversity paradigm, which views neurological, mental, and cognitive differences on the natural spectrum of human diversity, and the pathology paradigm, which assumes there is a right way or healthy way of being and to differ from it is unhealthy
- What it means for each person to have cognitive liberty and be able to express their own unique way of being and processing the world without repercussions
- How psychiatry curtails our cognitive liberty and freedom of mind by pathologizing difference to justify forceful and coercive measures
- The social model of disability, which states that people are disabled by lack of access and discrimination, not by medical conditions or internal deficits
- How the social model of disability intersects with neurodiversity and antipsychiatry but also falls short
- That Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) constitutes a human rights abuse against Autistic children, forcing and coercing them to act more normal and less different
- That other behaviour therapies and even humanistic therapies can be coercive as well
- That the autism industry profits off of the pathology paradigm, convincing parents there is something wrong with their Autistic children and that it is not okay to be Autistic, and their children need to be subjected to ABA and other "treatments"
- How antipsychiatry and neurodiversity intersect with feminism and queer studies
- Why it is necessary for educators to teach students "mad literacy" from an early age
- The importance of writing and publishing literature with accurate, positive representations of neurodivergent and Mad people
- How we can build communities in which people support one another through emotional distress without violating anyone's autonomy or restricting anyone's freedom
- Why the conventional notion of "suicide prevention" is problematic and can serve to take away people's coping skills
- How the ideas of somatic therapy can help us support people in distress
Relevant Links
Bonnie Burstow's articles for Mad in America
The Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry
Throw Away the Master's Tools: Liberating Ourselves from the Pathology Paradigm by Nick Walker
Neuroqueer: An Introduction by Nick Walker
The social model of disability vs. the medical model of disability
To get in touch with us email: podcasts@madinamerica.com
© Mad in America 2017
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice. |
| 0:13.5 | Hello, this is James, and welcome to the Madden America podcast. |
| 0:17.4 | This week, Madden America editor, Emily Shearer Cutler, presents the first in a series of interviews that examine the many important issues around force treatment and cognitive liberty. |
| 0:28.2 | The series will examine philosophical, theological and sociological perspectives on coercive treatment. |
| 0:34.4 | In this first part, Emily interviews two well-known and very respected academics and |
| 0:38.9 | activists, Bonnie Burstow and Nick Walker. This is a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion on some |
| 0:44.7 | important and controversial issues. Welcome to the Mad in America podcast. This week, I am excited |
| 0:51.6 | to introduce not just one, but two activists and academics who have |
| 0:56.2 | dedicated much of their lives to fighting for the human rights and civil liberties of those |
| 1:01.1 | labeled mentally ill, Bonnie Burstow and Nick Walker. |
| 1:05.1 | Bonnie Burstow is a faculty member at the University of Toronto and an anti-psychiatry activist. Last year, Dr. Burstow launched |
| 1:14.1 | the world's first anti-psychiatry scholarship at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute of |
| 1:20.2 | Education. She has written numerous books, papers, and articles, including blogs for Madin America |
| 1:26.5 | on the coercive nature of the |
| 1:28.8 | institution of psychiatry. Nick Walker is recognized as one of the leading thinkers in the |
| 1:35.1 | emergent field of neurodiversity. He is a faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies |
| 1:41.4 | and a co-founder and editor at Autonomous Press in an independent publishing house that prints manuscripts by neurodivergent and mad people. |
| 1:50.8 | I'd like to start out by asking you both to introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about your work. |
| 1:56.0 | Bonnie, could you tell us a little bit about what led you to become an anti-psychiatry activist and the work you do now? |
| 2:02.2 | That's a tall order. |
| 2:04.5 | Let me say that like lots of people, I was, you know, I had a doodle hat. |
| 2:13.1 | I'm a human being in the world, and I could not help but see all the horror that psychiatry was causing for a human being in the world and I could not help but see all the horror that psychiatry was causing |
... |
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