Aina Naval i Cucurella
Aina Naval i Cucurella is a survivor. Through lived experience she writes and takes political action against systemic oppression, focusing on the Psychiatric Systems. She has participated as a speaker in various conferences and has published articles.
She loves nature, animals, climbing, folk music and dance, and minorized languages. She usually writes in Catalan, her native language.
We are not brains
Survivor voices against Psychiatry, its ideological categorization of human suffering, lies, and violence.
“Mental health” has been at the center of many conversations in recent times. It may seem like a breakthrough to make suffering and dissident experiences visible. However, there is a whole series of narratives that have permeated society and collective imaginaries that come from the hegemonic medical model of psychiatry that aim to keep us as productive or consumer entities, individualize suffering, and maintain the capitalist modernity and systems of domination rat race.
Suffering is thought of within a body – mind binomial. However, human beings are much more complex, multidimensional, and multifaceted. The word “health” places discomfort on a health – illness continuum, where all pain we cannot sustain or do not understand, as well as the desire to live life diverging from the system and the norm, automatically constitutes a pathology that must be treated and medicalized.
The Hegemonic Medical Discourse, a concept that comes from Health Anthropology, the Psychiatric Institution, and the Mental Health Industrial Complex, comes from a cis-heteropatriarchal, white, and biologicist tradition that aims to individualize and depoliticize us. The reality is, however, that science has not managed to find biomarkers that support the labels that appear in diagnostic manuals. Theories about chemical imbalances are, therefore, mere hypotheses and not truths or actual entities.
Through these narratives, we end up justifying torture and violence in hospitals and public and private facilities around the world: forced admissions, mechanical restraints, forced consumption of psychiatric drugs, electroshocks… That is why Psychiatry Survivors and Mad Movements are demanding the abolition of these practices, to get our agency back and to be able to live a different life, as well as fighting for the abolition of the systems of oppression in the capitalist modernity and the construction of a life free of domination. We also politicize our pain.
No necessitem teràpia, necessitem barricades i contenidors en flames.
Survivors reject the terminology “mental health” and prefer to refer to experiences of suffering, crises, rupture with shared reality… and we are committed to talking about what happens inside us with our own words. Language creates narratives and allows us to delve deeper and give meaning to what happens to us, reclaiming our collective knowledge and therefore being able to create collective action.
Abolition of the (P)system movements are often misunderstood. They are not a wholesale denial of suffering or of biology. They are political and ethical movements that critique the power structures of psychiatry: the way it pathologizes difference, polices deviance, and medicalizes social injustice. Pain is not always an illness—and “treatment” must never come at the expense of autonomy, dignity, or freedom.
We need new ways of conceptualizing human suffering and pain—ones that resist medical domination and nurture the possibility of healing on our own terms.
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