Through acid psychiatry to acid communism. Psychedelic renaissance in psychiatry as a chance for a paradigm shift
Praktyka Teoretyczna December 30, 2025 DOI: 10.19195/prt.2025.2.9 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Ideology Communism Paradigm shift Mental illness Deconstruction building Subjectivity The renaissance Realism Psychoanalysis Aesthetics Element criminal law Institution Mental health Epistemology Psyche Subversion Perspective graphical Victory Late capitalism |
| Citations | 1 |
| Key points | Argues that repoliticizing mental illness and deconstructing psychiatry's ideology are necessary steps toward challenging capitalist realism and envisioning acid communism, while noting that psychedelics are being co-opted by capitalist and psychiatric orders. |
Abstract
Mark Fisher wrote “the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.” This paper attempts to develop this thought and show how the repoliticization of issues defined as mental illnesses that could have an emancipatory potential and undermine capitalist realism could look like and how it could be related to the contemporary phenomenon of “psychedelic renaissance”. This repoliticization could constitute the first step towards acid communism – a step that would enable a comprehensive formulation of the project, the imagining of both acid communism itself as well as the road towards it. Even though psychedelics could provide an impulse for the change of the dominant psychiatric paradigm and the reorganization of mental health services, the process of the interception of these substances by the alienating and commodifying orders of psychiatry and capitalism can already be observed, so that both of the intertwined and mutually supporting orders can in fact be strengthened. From this perspective the institution of psychiatry becomes a key element preserving the status quo, which makes the imagining of the end of capitalism impossible. Politicization of mental health, that could question capitalist realism, needs to be connected with the deconstruction of the ideology of psychiatry.