Through acid psychiatry to acid communism. Psychedelic renaissance in psychiatry as a chance for a paradigm shift
Praktyka Teoretyczna December 30, 2025 Radosław Stupak 1 citation
Mark Fisher argued that repoliticizing mental illness is urgent for challenging capitalist realism. This paper develops that thought, showing how redefining issues labeled as mental illnesses could have emancipatory potential and undermine capitalist realism, linking this to the contemporary "psychedelic renaissance." Such repoliticization could be a first step toward acid communism, enabling the imagining of both the project and the path to it. Although psychedelics might shift the dominant psychiatric paradigm and reorganize mental health services, their interception by alienating and commodifying orders of psychiatry and capitalism can strengthen both systems. The institution of psychiatry thus becomes a key element preserving the status quo, making the end of capitalism unimaginable. Politicizing mental health to question capitalist realism requires deconstructing the ideology of psychiatry.