Anti-adaptive healing names therapeutic approaches that refuse to adjust individuals to unjust conditions. It contrasts sharply with mainstream psychiatry and psychology that aim to restore functional participation in existing systems. Instead, anti-adaptive healing demands simultaneous attention to psychic wounds and systemic transformation. It maintains critical distance from normalcy whilst genuinely addressing suffering.
The concept addresses a fundamental paradox. People living under oppression experience genuine psychological damage requiring care and healing. Yet healing cannot mean accommodating to conditions that wounded them. Traditional therapeutic frameworks seek to make people functional within existing arrangements. Anti-adaptive healing recognises that true wellbeing requires transforming those arrangements.
Frantz Fanon’s militant psychopathologist
Frantz Fanon provides the exemplary figure. Working as psychiatrist at Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria during colonial occupation, Fanon attempted to introduce therapeutic innovations. He discovered that healing within colonial society proved impossible. For colonised Algerians, “belonging” to society meant subjugation rather than integration.
Fanon faced impossible choice. He could adjust patients to colonial reality, helping them function within oppressive structures. This would alleviate individual symptoms whilst leaving systemic violence intact. Alternatively, he could refuse therapeutic work entirely, declaring healing impossible under colonisation.
Fanon chose neither path. He shifted his practice to support anti-colonial struggle directly. Rather than abandoning therapeutic commitment, he redefined what healing meant. Liberation became prerequisite for genuine psychological health. The task was not adjusting people to intolerable conditions but transforming those conditions.
Fred Moten terms this the “militant psychopathologist,” the figure situated between transforming and transformed worlds. Fanon practiced medicine whilst fighting for conditions enabling actual healing. His therapeutic work became inseparable from revolutionary commitment.
The problem of clinical neutrality
Mainstream therapeutic frameworks insist on clinical neutrality. Therapists should remain detached from social and political contexts, focusing solely on individual psychic processes. This supposedly prevents imposing values on patients and maintains professional boundaries.
Anti-adaptive healing rejects this neutrality as impossible and undesirable. Psychological suffering always occurs within specific social contexts. Ignoring those contexts does not produce neutrality. It produces implicit acceptance of existing arrangements as natural and unchangeable.
Chilean psychoanalysts during Pinochet’s dictatorship exemplified problems with neutrality. The Chilean Psychoanalytic Association maintained detachment whilst torture and disappearance occurred throughout society. Patients described trauma from state violence. Analysts interpreted these as intrapsychic conflicts whilst denying immediate social environment.
This institutional failure necessitated alternative organisations like ILAS that explicitly rejected clinical neutrality. They acknowledged that torture survivors’ symptoms resulted from torture, not internal pathology. Treatment required addressing political violence directly rather than bracketing it as external to therapeutic work.
Toni Cade Bambara’s healing as revolution
Toni Cade Bambara articulated anti-adaptive healing through fiction. Her novel The Salt Eaters centres on Velma Henry, an activist who attempted suicide after exhaustion from sustained organising. The novel refuses both celebrating Velma’s self-sacrifice and pathologising her breakdown.
Bambara’s healer Minnie Ransom asks crucial question: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” Wellness here means something specific. It means capacity to continue struggle, not adjustment to oppressive conditions. The question acknowledges that healing requires change in both Velma and the world.
Bambara developed this through researching healing traditions among Black women in the American South. She understood healing as necessarily collective and embedded in community. Her healing practices combined traditional African-derived methods with contemporary political analysis. The point was not individual psychological adjustment but collective transformation.
The novel’s non-linear temporality reflects anti-adaptive healing’s relationship to time. Bambara insisted on acting “as if the revolution is here” rather than postponing healing until after transformation. This temporal paradox structures anti-adaptive practice. People cannot wait for revolution to begin healing. Yet genuine healing requires revolutionary transformation.
David Becker’s extreme traumatisation
David Becker’s work with Chilean dictatorship survivors developed the concept of extreme traumatisation. This differs fundamentally from post-traumatic stress disorder frameworks. PTSD assumes discrete traumatic events in past requiring individual psychological processing. Extreme traumatisation recognises ongoing persecution creating cumulative damage.
Becker argued that “extreme traumatization is never only individual destruction or only a sociopolitical process. It is always both.” This formulation refuses separating psychological from political dimensions. Torture produces specific psychological symptoms. Those symptoms cannot be addressed without acknowledging torture’s political functions and continuing effects.
Treatment approaches derived from this understanding differ from standard PTSD interventions. Rather than helping individuals process traumatic memories in isolation, therapy must address how dictatorship’s legacies persist structurally. Healing requires both individual therapeutic work and collective political struggle for truth, justice and transformation.
Becker characterised PTSD as “the Coca-Cola of psychiatry,” a universalised Western framework imposed globally whilst erasing specific historical and political contexts. Anti-adaptive healing instead demands contextualised understanding of how particular forms of violence produce particular patterns of suffering.
Palestinian psychiatry under occupation
Samah Jabr’s work as Palestinian psychiatrist illustrates anti-adaptive healing’s necessity under ongoing oppression. She argues that individual treatment cannot proceed effectively without acknowledging continuous structural violence. Occupation does not constitute past trauma requiring working through. It operates as present reality shaping every dimension of life.
Conventional therapeutic frameworks assume relatively stable social contexts where individual psychological work can occur. They address how past events affect present functioning. Palestinians experience ongoing dispossession, restriction of movement, arbitrary detention and violence. These are not past events but continuous conditions.
Attempting individual therapy whilst bracketing occupation mystifies suffering’s origins. It treats symptoms resulting from systemic violence as individual pathology. This doubles the violence. People suffer from occupation and then get pathologised for experiencing that suffering.
Anti-adaptive healing in this context requires integrating therapeutic practice with resistance to occupation. Healing cannot mean adjusting to intolerable conditions. It means simultaneously addressing psychological damage and fighting structures producing that damage.
Abolitionist healing and temporal paradoxes
Avery Gordon proposes “abolitionist time” combining acute patience with urgency. Abolition requires immediate action whilst acknowledging transformation extends beyond any individual or generation. This temporal framework structures anti-adaptive healing.
People cannot postpone healing until after abolition. They suffer now and require care now. Yet genuine healing cannot occur whilst carceral violence continues, creating temporal paradox similar to patient urgency. Healing is urgent and transformation is gradual. These temporalities must coexist.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of “non-reformist reform” proves relevant. Some reforms strengthen existing systems by making them more tolerable. Non-reformist reforms point toward and enable systemic transformation. Anti-adaptive healing similarly seeks therapeutic interventions that do not simply adjust people to oppression but enable resistance and prefigure liberation.
Hannah Black imagines “revolutionary mourning practice” continuing after revolution. Even after overthrowing oppressive systems, people will carry trauma requiring ongoing care. This extends anti-adaptive healing’s temporal framework beyond revolutionary rupture. Healing begins rather than ends with systemic transformation.
Free clinics and solidarity healthcare
Historical free clinic movements demonstrated anti-adaptive healing practically. The Black Panther Party’s survival programmes understood health as inseparable from liberation struggle. They rejected medical models pathologising Black resistance whilst providing genuine care for communities abandoned by mainstream healthcare.
These initiatives operated through solidarity rather than charity. They did not simply provide services but built collective capacity. Patients became practitioners. Healthcare happened within communities rather than being administered to them. This prefigured liberated social relations whilst addressing immediate needs.
ACT UP’s response to AIDS crisis combined direct action against pharmaceutical companies and government negligence with networks caring for sick and dying. Members disrupted institutions whilst nursing friends. Funerals became political demonstrations. This integrated practice refused separating care from confrontation.
Contemporary examples include Common Ground Health Clinic in post-Katrina New Orleans, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, and Thessaloniki social solidarity health centres. These exemplify care webs acknowledging that carers themselves require care. They create reciprocal networks rather than service provision models.
Wholeness and fragmentation
Bambara insisted that healing requires seeing connections across seemingly disparate struggles. Fragmentation maintains domination by preventing recognition of systemic patterns. Wholeness involves understanding how different oppressions interconnect and how various struggles relate.
This differs from liberal pluralism treating different issues as separate. It also differs from reductive frameworks collapsing everything into single primary contradiction. Wholeness means recognising specific forms of oppression whilst understanding their structural relationships.
Psychologically, fragmentation manifests as inability to connect personal suffering to political contexts. People experience symptoms without understanding their social origins. They blame themselves for reactions to oppressive conditions. Anti-adaptive healing works toward wholeness by revealing these connections.
The Combahee River Collective articulated this through identity politics rooted in analysing interlocking oppressions. They understood how race, class, gender and sexuality operate simultaneously rather than additively. Healing required addressing all dimensions rather than prioritising one whilst deferring others.
The refusal of self-care discourse
Contemporary self-care discourse often operates adaptively. It individualises suffering whilst promoting consumption of wellness products and services. It treats burnout as personal failure requiring individual therapeutic intervention rather than as evidence of systemic exploitation.
Mindfulness and meditation, practices originating in contemplative traditions seeking liberation, get repurposed as productivity tools. They should make workers calmer and more focused. Emotional regulation serves corporate efficiency. This exemplifies adaptive healing par excellence.
Anti-adaptive healing distinguishes genuine care from commodified wellness. Caring for oneself and each other proves necessary for sustaining struggle. Activists cannot simply sacrifice themselves until destroyed. However, care must occur within frameworks acknowledging that true wellbeing requires systemic transformation.
The question is not whether to engage in self-care but what care means and serves. Care embedded in communities, oriented toward collective liberation, and refusing adjustment to oppression differs fundamentally from individualised wellness consumption.
Practical tensions
Anti-adaptive healing faces genuine practical tensions. People require immediate relief from suffering. They cannot wait for revolution to address psychological distress. Yet therapeutic interventions risk reinforcing precisely what needs transformation.
This creates strategic dilemmas. When should activists engage mainstream mental health services despite those services’ limitations? When does therapy support continued struggle and when does it counsel accommodation? How can therapeutic work avoid depoliticising whilst genuinely helping people?
These questions lack formulaic answers. Responses depend on specific contexts, available resources, and particular forms of suffering. The point is maintaining critical awareness of therapeutic frameworks’ political functions whilst pragmatically using available tools.
Some argue for building alternative institutions entirely outside mainstream systems. Others advocate transforming existing institutions from within. Anti-adaptive healing probably requires both strategies simultaneously. Building autonomous alternatives whilst fighting to transform mainstream systems.
The unity of struggle and healing
Anti-adaptive healing ultimately insists that struggling for liberation and healing from oppression are not sequential but simultaneous. People do not heal first and then struggle. They do not postpone healing until after victory. They heal through struggling whilst struggling to heal.
This integration challenges both therapeutic individualism and political voluntarism. It refuses therapeutic frameworks treating social transformation as external to healing. It refuses political frameworks dismissing psychological suffering as bourgeois distraction.
Genuine healing requires transformation. Genuine transformation requires healing. Neither can proceed independently, creating practical and theoretical challenges whilst opening possibilities for integrated practice combining therapeutic care with political struggle in ways that strengthen rather than undermine each other.