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.
Praktyka Teoretyczna
July 15, 2021
Radosław Stupak
1 citation
Building on Mark Fisher's call to repoliticize mental illness as a challenge to capitalist realism, this theoretical paper explores how redefining mental health issues could undermine the status quo and open space for imagining an alternative society—'acid communism.' While psychedelics might initially disrupt dominant psychiatric paradigms, they are being co-opted by capitalist and psychiatric systems that reinforce existing power structures. The institution of psychiatry thus becomes a key obstacle to envisioning the end of capitalism. Genuine politicization of mental health requires deconstructing psychiatry's ideology, not merely reforming it.
Journal of Humanistic Psychology
June 19, 2026
Radosław Stupak, Pesach Lichtenberg
Psychiatric drug research has limited effectiveness because it relies on symptom-scale trials and biological reductionism that miss the subjective, context-dependent nature of medication effects. A proposed methodology, First-Person Psychopharmacology (1PPP), combines the rigor of randomized controlled trials with qualitative, idiographic methods to study how psychoactive substances alter consciousness, emotion, and behavior in real-life contexts, focusing on personal meaning, social situation, and narrative frameworks. Using a mixed design with multiple experimental groups, interviews, and interpretative and quantitative analyses, 1PPP aims to provide a more ecologically valid and person-centered alternative. Putting the psyche back into psychopharmacology is essential for advancing a humanistic and scientifically robust understanding of psychiatric medications.