The Psychiatric Manufacturing of Identity

On the political circumstances behind rigid, brittle identity constructions.

A patient sits before me, sobbing. When I ask him if he can put words to his emotional state, he mutters: “I was hoping for a simple answer.”

I empathized with his wish to find an easy answer to the questions he had about why he had always felt out of place, and why he felt so awful at times that he wanted to kill himself. He had spent large parts of his…