Efrat Gold
Professional Biography
Efrat Gold is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, engaging in mad and disability studies. Through her writing and activism, she challenges dominant views of mental health and illness, moving towards contextualized and relational understandings of well-being. Gold critiques psychiatry, focusing on those most vulnerable and marginalized by psychiatric power, discourse, and treatments. Her work is staunchly feminist, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive. Through explorations into meaning-making and constructions of legitimacy, Gold unsettles psychiatric hegemony by ‘returning to the sites where certainty has been produced’.
How Psychiatry Became Science
Efrat explains the history of how social problems were medicalized under eugenics and how the concept of ‘mental hygiene’ transitioned into ‘mental health.’ Through this transition, psychiatry ended up being legitimized as
a science while retaining the legacy of eugenics.
Eugenics and the Origins of “Mental Illness”
Efrat begins by pointing out that eugenics is not an inherently evil idea; its goal is simply to alleviate suffering and improve the lives of human beings. The problem is that this goal is interpreted by whoever has the most power and privilege. In this way, social structures end up dictating who is mentally ill (or abnormal) and who isn’t. Nowadays, psychiatry is the field that makes these decisions. Efrat then goes on to explain the ways in which social contexts impact mental health, which are not usually considered in psychiatric diagnoses.
Learning from Disability Studies, Anti-Psychiatry, and Mad Studies
Efrat defines disability studies, anti-psychiatry, and mad studies. All three are different, but have in common the view that social determinants of health are important and overlooked by the mainstream medical world. Disability studies asserts that ‘disability’ comes not from the individual body but from ableist constructions in society; anti-psychiatry holds that psychiatric conditions are not medical disorders, and so psychiatry should be abolished; and mad studies is a broader collective of people who reclaim their madness in ways that feel right to them, whether that includes psychiatric diagnoses or not.
The Role of Suffering
Efrat explains her belief that suffering is a natural part of life, and that a disservice psychiatry has done to our cultural worldview is to deny this truth.
When Our Education Systems Don’t Serve Us
Efrat points out the way in which the education systems operate under privileged assumptions, expecting an unrealistic level of uniformity from their students and promoting the singular goal of productivity. Universities
tend to off-put the responsibility of radical change by putting money into mindfulness or time-management workshops, but have yet to provide more than these superficial efforts. Due to institutional rigidity, a lot of the
responsibility to be responsive to students’ needs falls on individual faculty members.
When You’re Having a Hard Time
Efrat addresses undergraduate students with her core piece of advice: trust yourself. She adds that developing an understanding of systemic factors that might be contributing to your struggles is an important way of taking
the burden off of yourself.