"In Crip Screens, Olivia Banner presents a history of psychiatry's ongoing efforts to incorporate emerging media and technologies into treatment and research-a background to contemporary therapy chatbots, virtual patient training programs, and targeted advertising for pharmaceuticals-in relation to how Black, feminist-of-color, and crip subjects resisted those incorporations. This history illuminates that the media and technologies central to categorizing certain people as "mentally ill," "pathological,"and "deviant" have also been used by those so categorized to resist such labels, and to provide counterpsychiatric visions of how care for those in distress could happen. Core chapters center on intensive efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to wrest away frompsychiatry its hold over representing mental distress and producing categories of pathologies. These efforts, the book argues, were distinct from what is now accepted as the anti-psychiatry movement. In doing so, the book recovers a lost history of disability politics that countered psychiatry's normalizing aims via cultural productions"-- Provided by publisher.
Olivia Banner provides a wide-ranging history of how psychiatry’s incorporation of media and technology has been met with resistance by Black, feminist-of-color, and crip activism.
In Crip Screens, Olivia Banner provides a wide-ranging and ongoing history of Black, feminist-of-color, and crip resistance to psychiatry’s incorporation of hegemonic media technologies into treatment and research. Banner shows how institutions use documentary films, data visualization, network graphs, therapy chatbots, virtual patient training programs, and pharmaceutical advertising to pathologize certain people as “deviant” and “mentally ill.” Those people so categorized have used media technologies toward alternative visions of care. Examining insurgent media and technology efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, Banner shows how women and communities of color worked to wrest away from psychiatry its hold over representing mental distress and pathological categorization. These efforts and innovations, she argues, were distinct from what is now accepted as the antipsychiatry movement. In so doing, Banner recovers a lost history of disability politics––what she calls crip screens––that refused psychiatry’s use of cultural productions toward its carceral and subjugating designs.
