Steiner refers to the internal "voice" of internalized oppression as "the Pig." This language would have been familiar to members of the Black Panther Party who often used "the Pig" to refer to police and other officials who were complicit in racist imperialist capitalist oppression. 

Steiner's Discussion of Internalized Oppression as "the Pig"

In traditional psychiatry often anger was classed at the time of Steiner's writing as irrational, neurotic, or an otherwise undesirable reaction. Radical Psychiatry as described by Steiner however viewed anger as a healthy first step in liberation and an appropriate reaction to oppression. Radical Psychiatry when on to frame violence as an appropriate response to the dismissal of anger. This framework aligns with the framing of Black anger by the BPP as justified and needing productive expression.

Radical Psychiatry's Understanding of Anger

Steiner argues that psychiatry could no longer be viewed as an "art of soul healing" because of its enmeshment with the racist medical establishment. In contrast, Steiner frames radical psychiatry as community control of soul healing. Steiner supports this framing with the goals of Radical Psychiatry being to demystify the enmeshment between establishment psychiatry and medical racism and to show that the scarcity of psychiatric resources is artificially generated by making psychiatric skills available to the populous. Steiner believed that by making psychiatric skills publicly available it would be possible for people to heal each other. The rhetoric here of "community control" and "body and soul" mimic the BPP's position of advocating for community control of medical, educational, and law enforcement institutions in order serve people "body and soul" by providing tools that individuals can use to improve and uplift there own communities.

Framing Radical Psychiatry as "Community Control" 

(1) Discussion of Internalized Oppression as "the Pig"
(2) Radical Psychiatry's Understanding of Anger
(3) Framing Radical Psychiatry as "Community Control"

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Steiner, a white author and founder of radical psychiatry, asserts that "psychiatry is a political activity" because the influence psychiatrists have over the lives in which they intervene. Steiner holds that psychiatry and psychiatrists cannot be neutral objective forces because of the position of power they hold over their patients and that it is these false claims of neutrality that lead to marginalized people avoiding psychiatric services. Steiner then states that a radical psychiatrist should advocate for the side of those whom they are helping and not look for the wrongness in the person and will take the ways someone is being oppressed into account when assessing their mental health. 

"Principles of Radical Psychiatry" by Claude Steiner

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

Black Disability Politics

Building off of Steiner's idea that psychiatrist should look at how oppression affects their patient's mental health, the BPP believed that overmedicalization obscured disability, illness, and disease as politicized identities and instead presents disabled identity as an individual experience. The BPP believed that this individualization of disability obscured how racialized state violence often creates disability. 

Learn Before

Related

Learn After