Ordinary unhappiness: Review of Khameer Kidia’s ‘Empire of Madness’

Khameer Kidia says he wants “a supernova.” He wants “an explosion large and bright.” He has seen how his patients — and not just his patients, but how all the patients “flooding our emergency rooms” with “depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia,” how all the patients in the world, perhaps, are not suffering from any of the maladies found in the DSM. They’re “suffering from oppression.” He has seen how mental healthcare “purports to care while it inflicts harms that worsen mental health,” how “western psychiatry literally can’t keep up with the mental distress Western capitalism creates around the world.” So he “is calling for the end of psychiatry.”

Or rather: He’s calling to make “mental health care … part of every health-care provider’s job.” He wants it to be “less specialized and part of everyone’s work, not just psychiatrists’.” Psychotherapy, which, as Kidia explains, “doesn’t tackle the causes” of “structural