Paper short abstract:

Psychiatry holds in high regard measuring the unmeasurable. To eradicate the stigma that such measurements perpetuate, this paper aims to break through the glass ceiling to enable the silenced to be heard, better understood and empowered, manifested through text. This is the Silenced Manifesto.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes the form of an anthropological study of mental health. Specifically, my autoethnography of living with schizoaffective disorder.

I have been labelled as a lesser citizen, lesser human and a social misfit. This labelling is part of the culture and values which encompass it. There is a continuing medical culture of measurement, which seems to justify values and an ethos which disempowers those living with a major psychotic illness.

I explore the experience of being tested and measured. I explore how biomedicine has the capacity to stigmatise and de-humanise people living with mental health conditions, but also how difficult it is to resist the definitions and labels imposed upon me; how mental health is textualised.

In a sense, biomedicine tries to measure the unmeasurable, and use crafted measurements to define and confine subjects, as in the mentally ill, often inappropriately and over-zealously.

By looking at the ways I have been labelled, and by understanding that labelling as a function of the scientific culture that crafts it and the social culture that validates it, I examine this hypothesis: that psychiatric science rests on a self-vindicating ethos of clinical measurement and consequent labelling which perpetuates mental illness.

This paper sets out to break through the glass ceiling and straight jacket of labelling, to enable the silenced to be heard, better understood and empowered, manifested mainly through text and otherwise. This is here called the Silenced Manifesto.