Abstract
The work of the Afro-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon is crucial to understanding the psychological and socio-political causes of disorder. Drawing upon his corpus, this article details the radical potential for disalienation located within his sociodiagnostic method and argues that personal and structural well-being can only be achieved together. This article will also both psychiatric and phenomenological models of depression as experienced by Africana people in order to better illuminate the usefulness of sociodiagnostics.
Highlights
There are branches of psychiatry that view psychological symptoms and causes as endogenous or not attributable to any external or environmental factor
If psychiatry is the branch of medicine focused on the proper diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders it must be attentive to the particular psychosocial factors that cause maladaptation, even if these causes lie outside the body
Sociodiagnostics begins from the premise that one’s psyche is intimately connected with the environment and both the diagnosis and treatment of disorder necessarily deals with restructuring unhealthy social conditions
Summary
There are branches of psychiatry that view psychological symptoms and causes as endogenous or not attributable to any external or environmental factor. In analyzing the brutalities of the colonial situation, Fanon aimed to accurately diagnose such an unhealthy environment, he urged his patients to become actional and change the colonial order of Algeria This psychology methodology, called “sociodiagnostics,” reveals how racism and colonialism function as socio-etiological causes of disease requiring both patients and mental health practitioners to restructure the disordered socio-political arrangements that make such conditions possible. Sociodiagnostics as a psychiatric methodology accounts for socio-etiological causes and the lived-experience of alienation, and more importantly offers treatment beyond the psyche In this respect, sociodiagnostics begins from the premise that one’s psyche is intimately connected with the environment and both the diagnosis and treatment of disorder necessarily deals with restructuring unhealthy social conditions. If there is a taint, it lies not in the ‘soul’ of the individual but rather in that of the environment” (FANON, 1986, p. 165)
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