Thank you for this piece. As a White woman I don’t have much to contribute, but as a psychiatric survivor I’ll just add this: yes, every person who is labeled with a “serious” mental illness endured discrimination, exclusion, and in many cases, flagrant human rights violations (I.e. everything that happens when one is committed involuntarily).

That said, even within this particular violent system (psychiatry) race matters, and one benefits from Whiteness. I won’t delve into the years of horror stories I have from the asylum, but I’ll say that Black people are disproportionately diagnosed with schizophrenia (it’s colloquially referees to as the Black disease because it was so over-applied to Civil Rights activists through the 60s and 70s), and Black people are more likely to be diagnosed with “serious” mental illness if they’re activists. Behind locked doors, “treatment” is enforced through a White, western lens, so people who can’t or won’t conform to White notions of respectability are more likely to be incarcerated longer. This dates back to slavery, when the first version of the DSM included “drapetomania” – insanity amongst those who tried to flee captivity.

This is all to say that yes, those of us who have been diagnosed as seriously mentally ill encounter enormous barriers, *and*, because psychiatry itself is a colonial tool, we still benefit from Whiteness within that system.

Thanks again.