No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Claude Steiner. Steiner was a giant in the field of gender theory, the father of the so-called “radical psychiatry” movement in Berkeley in the 1970s; he wrote about men and women’s “internalized oppression” and advocated for social-justice-based therapies; he helped popularize the idea of emotional literacy. Radical psychiatry criticized standard modes of clinical treatment that often ignored the social context in which patients were living—a world in which war, poverty, racism, and inequality were endemic. Radical psychiatry called for systemic upheaval to the social and political order. It was an antiauthoritarian movement born of a counter culture outspoken in its criticisms of standard medical interventions, like drugs, involuntary hospitalization, or electrotherapy. It aspired to a treatment model that purported that mental illness could often be addressed through social theory and personal change, rather than the medical industry.