With World Health Day only a few days ago, we feel the urgency to take the floor as the Critical Psychology collective, together with the university collectives Spina and Liberi Saperi Critici and the transfeminist collective Squeert, to build together a collective discourse on mental health that we believe is necessary, urgent and deeply political.

On Saturday we were at the regional demonstration on mental health organized by the Veneto Public Health Coordination in Venice, to contribute to this important day of mobilization by bringing this intervention, in which we felt it was crucial to emphasize how psychological suffering is often rooted in material and social conditions of marginalization. 

“…. We felt the need to come together as an assembly to reflect on the intersections of mental health with people’s other dimensions of identity and life, and to ask what meaning mental health can take on today, in the face of a geopolitical landscape of global war and a crisis of democratic values, with a government that continues to implement securitarian and repressive measures such as the establishment of red zones and the proposed DDL Security, just yesterday turned into a decree law and approved by the council of ministers to cancel parliamentary discussion. We will not remain silent as the government continues its stranglehold. We will not be silent as the government continues its authoritarian stranglehold on the skin of those who struggle. 

Today we carry a banner that reads “Freedom is therapeutic,” a phrase that appeared on the walls of the former asylum in Trieste. We believe deeply in this phrase so we are here to say loudly that talking about mental health means talking about the forms of repression that weigh on marginalized subjectivities. They want us to believe that psychological well-being is an individual matter, a problem to be solved by willpower or recourse to medicalization, but we know that there is no mental health without social justice.

Within the framework of a reactionary government that systematically denies people’s rights, mental health becomes a luxury for few, and through bills such as the Zaffini DDL and the Cantù DDL it risks being enslaved to a securitarian and institutionalizing logic, with measures such as extending the duration of Compulsory Health Treatment and increasing places in psychiatric wards and Residences for the Execution of Security Measures. These are what the governing parties are focusing on, instead of dealing with the lack of resources and the strengthening of territorial mental health services. As has often been the case in the past, psychiatry is in danger of continuing to be used as a social control device, to remove from the social fabric anyone who is considered “deviant.” Psychiatric diagnoses are instrumentalized to pathologize forms of resistance and depoliticize psychological suffering, thus reducing it to an individual problem instead of recognizing it as a symptom of a sick system. A system that most violently crushes marginalized and non-heteronormed subjectivities: people detained in prisons and Detention and Repatriation Centers, held in inhumane conditions, sedated with psychotropic drugs. We reiterate, total institutions are pathogenic places and there can be no health for all as long as they continue to exist.

We are here for trans people, who see their existence denied and their health jeopardized by constant attacks on their right to self-determination and access to care. For students, who live in precarious conditions, crushed by a university system that isolates and pushes toward models of hyperproductivity and competitiveness.

Psychological distress is considered only in terms of discomfort, malaise, dysfunction, when it prevents us from contributing to the functioning of a sociopolitical system that favors policies of militarization, confinement, and annihilates for many the possibilities of well-being.

But psychological malaise is not a malfunction to be corrected; it is also the natural response to a system that oppresses. We want to be considered not only for the purposes of what our bodies and lives can produce, but in our needs and desires. We cannot accept that the answer to people’s suffering is repression, forced medicalization or individualization of the problem. We need accessible and equitable public health care for all, and a society that does not produce suffering, that does not raise us in a school system with a Eurocentric, patriarchal, sexist, and strongly abilist knowledge setting. But that makes it possible to create spaces of community and care.

There can be no mental health in a world that relies on unbridled capitalism; there can be no mental health in a state that relies on institutional violence. The logic of profit and securitarian policies are incompatible with a society that heals.”