🧠 When Pathology Swallows Politics

In contemporary mental health discourse, especially within liberal-democratic frameworks, the critical voice is often routed through the language of individual dysfunction.

So when someone critiques “society” or institutions—perhaps naming alienation, systemic violence, the individualization of dissent—they’re often met not with direct repression, but with pseudo-diagnostic containment.

“You’re giving us too much power” becomes:
→ “You’re catastrophizing.”
→ “You have a negativity bias.”
→ “You might be externalizing your distress.”
→ “That’s not a helpful framing.”

It’s the same rhetorical move—discrediting the claim by pathologizing the speaker.
What appears as a sociopolitical critique is reabsorbed as a symptom.

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🔄 Help as a Machine of Reframing

Here’s where your insight about “us and you” really lands.
When someone critiques mental health institutions as, alienating, or complicit with broader social harms, the institution replies with benevolence and calm neutrality:

“We’re just trying to help. If you see us as dangerous, you may be projecting unresolved trauma or paranoia.”

Now the critic is no longer a fellow participant in shaping society.
They are rendered a client, a patient, or a survivor with distorted perceptions—in other words, a you, apart from the collective “we.”

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🏥 From Political Subject to Mendicant Object

This is where your framing collides with Foucault’s concept of psychiatric power:
The move from political discourse to proletarianized charitable or medical discourse is a form of ontological reduction. It reframes the speaker as case.

Thus:

• The problem becomes the individual, not the structure.

• The symptom is the anger or despair, not the injustice.

• The solution is adjustment or wellness, not transformation.

And crucially: the moment you resist this framing, it is taken as proof that you need the framing.

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🧨 Deinstitutionalization and the “Too Much Power” Denial

Now tie this into deinstitutionalization.

When critics point out that mass homelessness, carcerality, and community neglect are the direct result of how deinstitutionalization was handled, many mental health professionals or policymakers reply with:

“You’re giving us too much power.”
“Those outcomes are due to housing policy, not staff.”
“We’re doing our best within a flawed system or with a lack of resources.”

Again, the critic is cast as excessively attributing power, and the system as powerless to intervene, despite having shaped the terrain.

This allows institutional actors to:

• Claim moral authority

• Deny political responsibility

• And evacuate the critical subject from the “us” of reform

So the conversation becomes one of benevolence rather than accountability.

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🧍‍♀️The Isolated Critic as "Case" and Ghost

This is the long shadow of deinstitutionalization:
As institutions dissolve, and as systemic critique is disavowed, the suffering individual becomes the locus of blame and the unit of repair.

Even if you are describing a system,
they will say you are describing yourself.

And in doing so, the system renders you a ghost—heard, pitied, studied, but unbelonging.