The psychiatrization of our children, or, an autoethnographic narrative of perpetuating First Nations genocide through ‘benevolent’ institutions

Abstract

I enter the discussion on madness and psychiatrization through breathing the air and walking the halls of ‘benevolent’ institutions, such as child protection and psychiatry, institutions that produce mental illness through the psychiatrization of the people they are meant to support. This narrative provides an example of the ways in which child welfare organizations are both sanist and racist in their organizing principles and in their interpretations of the needs and desires of marginalized people. This narrative provides an example of my own shifting complicity within the relations of power in a particular ‘benevolent’ child protection agency, a narrative that uses autoethnographic knowledge and queers my lived experience in order to unwrap and make visible the normalizing connections between psychiatrization, colonialism, racialization, and adultism.

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