DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK REVIEW - FROM THE CLINICS TO THE STREETS by Lara Sheehi

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This might be the first time I've reviewed a book so close to launch, but the topic she covers has been living 'rent free' in my head recently, and so this got pushed to the front of queue.

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Available DRM-free here.

A little over two years ago, I was diagnosed as being neurodiverse. AuDHD is the specific flavour of neural spiciness, if you're curious. Upon hearing the diagnosis, some of my colleagues on the left were sceptical, not of me being autistic, apparently that's self-evident to anyone who's ever been in conversation with me (not sure how I felt about hear that), but about ADHD. Depression and ADHD, they reckon, are creations of capitalism, part of capitalism's design of pushing medication to make perfect workers, and isolate us in the name of hyper-individualisation, to prevent us organising and despairing over the theft of our wages, value, and goods. Full disclosure, I'm also on an anti-depressant and have been for over a decade. Largely because my undergrad was in Chicago, where we were hyper individualised in a highly competitive environment, which was a bit of a culture shock for me that I hadn't taken well.

Dr Sheehi and I have something in common, we understand the leftist critiques of much of modern psychoanalysis. Where we differ, of course, is I've only ever been the patient, whilst she is a practising psychologist. What we have in common, again, is our shared usage of the Marxist lens to critique modern capitalism and its intrusions on the proletariat. Of course, as we move forward remember that my interpretation of Dr Sheehi's work is through the lens of an economist who also specialises in computational statistics, and not of a fellow psychologist.

Sheehi opens with an account of an unpleasant encounter she had a panel discussion. To be fair, we've all been there, panels are one of the reasons I avoid academic conferences, autism does come with a certain degree of social anxiety, after all. Any academic who has done a panel discussion can tell you that, if you're covering a 'spicy' topic, you cannot assume that everyone in the audience is there in good faith. There are a variety of reasons for this, in Dark Academia, which I may review someday, when I'm feeling braver, Peter Fleming outlines the ways in which the neo-liberal university has turned the 'competitive but collegial' atmosphere of academia into 'just competitive' as universities count success through, amongst other quantifiers, publications and citations. The latter encouraging academics to attack things that don't cite them. The increasingly competitive nature of the 'industry' has also led to an increasing level of toxicity as some actors within the space feel the only way to advance is to cut down their peers who deviate from their precise way of doing things. Amongst my listed specialities are 'the digital economy', digital automation, the gig economy, and AI. AI especially is one of these 'spicy' topics, and like many AI sceptics I've had more than a few attacks lobbed at my work, and occasionally felt 'gaslit' by popular media, management, etc.

Dr Sheehi is, as you may have gathered from her surname, an Arabic woman, who was, before her move into higher education, driven from her home by Israel's aggression into Lebanon. The conference she was speaking at was about providing support to victims of the on-going violence against Palestinian people both in Gaza and globally. This topic is considerably 'spicier' than AI. A more than considerable amount of money and violence has been spent pushing a specific narrative against the Palestinian people for a considerably long time. A lot of this energy has been directed specifically at silencing and discrediting defenders of the Palestinian people, presenting them as irrational, violent, anti-Semitic, unreasonable, or conspiratorial. When all this fails, it escalates to a confrontation, meant to make everyone involved feel unsafe. This is where Dr Sheehi opens, with her panel being interrupted by a Zionist shouting down her specifically, since she is the only Arabic woman on the panel, and room full of people, professional psychoanalysts like herself, unwilling to intervene because of notions of propriety and 'neutralness', despite there being nothing proper or neutral about an uninvited activist interrupting a scheduled panel and shouting it down. The attack was meant to make Dr Sheehi feel uncertain and isolated in a space that she had every right to be in, even make her question her place in that space. It was, simply put, the violence inherent in settler colonialism.

If you've read any of my 'Marx and the Death of the Author' series on this blog, you've seen me do some of the work of interpreting the founder of an epistemological lens into the modern day, often through the intermediary work(s) of others who have done the same for their respective time and place. Sheehi does not frequently invoke Marx in this book, but focuses instead on Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist who had joined the Algerian National Liberation Front, and after Algerian Independence spent a considerable amount of time advocating for the Pan-Africanist movement, a movement that will feature in a future Marx and the Death of the Author, or several, frankly, since amongst other writers I am a fan of Walter Rodney and W.E.B. Du Bois. Fanon, who died under suspicious circumstances whilst under the 'care' of the CIA at the National Institute of Health in Maryland, in 1961 is considerably closer to us on the timeline than Marx, who passed away in 1883. As such, Marx was not privy to much of the de-colonial and anti-colonial movements that would emerge in the years after his passing, whereas Fanon actively participated in multiple liberation struggles. Marx was an economist and 'political philosopher' who desired brining the scientific method to economics and political studies. Fanon was a psychiatrist, a discipline focused on bringing the scientific method to psychological studies.

A critical component to Fanon, and to Sheehi for that matter, is a criticism of the myriad ways that colonialism insists on replacing observable reality with a false hyper reality. It seeks to make the colonised, as well as the anti-colonial activists question the very reality in front of their eyes. When the colonised try to push back, to assert that the coloniser is lying to them, the coloniser responds with violence, either overtly, covertly, or explicitly or implicit. The coloniser needs to be seen as progress, the coloniser needs to be seen as inevitable, the coloniser needs to be seen as enlightened, and any deviation from this narrative needs to be violently stopped. Fanon wrote about this in his three 'main' works, Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, and The Wretched of the Earth. All three works were required reading when I was doing my undergraduate double major in Africa Studies. (My other major was Economics. Obvs). Sheehi never explicitly calls herself a Marxist, but Fanon sure did, like Lenin before him, he viewed colonialism as the natural outcome of capitalism. As a psychiatrist and a Marxist, he was able to add to Marx the first person insights of the colonised. Fanon had grown up and was educated as a colonised French subject, and fought against French colonialism in Algeria. He could not help but notice that the French people he was fighting against had grown uncomfortable with the fact that the Algerians had begun using the same tactics against them that they had used against the Nazis just over a decade prior, and that their colonial forces were using the same tactics against the Algerians that the Nazis had used against the French resistance. This growing unease with how quickly they returned to being the oppressor, and the failure of the French nationalists to acknowledge this hypocrisy was only possible because of the cognitive dissonance required to maintain notions of racial superiority and colonial imperialism. It was Fanon who first pointed out this cognitive dissonance of white supremacist thought in excruciating detail. It was Fanon who wrote in unflattering terms of the false hyper reality that French settler colonists in Algeria had to forcibly create and constantly work to keep the lie going against all observable reality in order to justify and maintain control of Algeria.

This lie, this lie necessary to keep colonial and capitalist order going despite its obvious contradictions in the lived experience of the coloniser and colonised alike, Fanon argued could only work if the colonisers also colonised the minds of the oppressed, giving us the term of 'internalised oppression'. When the coloniser tells you over and over again through media, violence, and the threat of social and economic isolation and destitution that you and your culture are inferior, eventually your psyche breaks and accepts it, and it is only here that the coloniser achieves absolute victory. Fanon argues this is what he experienced in French controlled Martinique (still a French overseas territory), this is what Fanon argues is the 'psychic' war the French settlers and the French state waged against him and the freedom fighters in Algeria during the horrendous Algerian War for Independence, and Fanon could safely extrapolate, through his comrades in the rest of the Pan-Africanist movement, that this was similarly the tactics of the British, American, and Portuguese Empires across the rest of Africa and the African diaspora. Later, Fanon would also see similar struggles in Ceylon/Sri Lanka that would further his work to oppressed peoples all over the world.

Sheehi brings it home to her personal experience as a psychiatrist that specialises in patients who have a background in post-colonial/anti-colonial activism, as well as her personal experience as an Arabic woman displaced from Lebanon due to Isreali violence, who currently does work as a Palestinian activist in the US.

Of course, you might be thinking 'psychiatry shouldn't be political'. This is a sentiment that she herself has come across a lot in her work as well. It's a similar sentiment to people who tell me that 'economics shouldn't be political' or 'computer science shouldn't be political'. The truth is, everything is political. As long as power is involved and human agency and decision making is involved, as long as we have to chose who makes the decisions and which narratives are dominant, everything is political. Homosexuality and transgenderism used to be classed as mental illnesses because that was the popular consensus at the time, driven by the power of outdated church doctrine and the whims of Henry VIII, of all people. Women who showed too much agency or upset their husbands were deemed 'hysterical', and Black people who reacted with rage to their oppression were often described as 'schizophrenic', with the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) listing 'racial antagonism' as a symptom of schizophrenia, a label that white American doctors (and their British counterparts) were over eager to slap on Black patients whose politics they didn't agree with in the 1960s and 70s. As Sheehi herself points out, Freud himself anticipated political usage of his field. His son-in-law even helped the American Military establish the fictitious sounding, cartoonishly evil, but all too real PSYOPS project.

In a future post, I might take the time to make the obvious case of why economics is political, and someday in the future even why computer science is political. But for today, I'll end the post by just recommending you read Sheehi's extremely well written book. I finished it in about two days.