Drapetomania: Freedom Recast as Illness

We like to believe medicine exists solely to heal. History tells a different story.

From slavery to women’s dissent, from homosexuality to neurodivergence, medical authority has repeatedly been used to define resistance as illness and compliance as health.

This video explores how diagnosis has been shaped by power, how difference has been pathologised, and how mental health is increasingly used as a tool of governance in schools, workplaces, welfare systems, and politics.

It argues for a politics of care that treats difference as human variation, not disorder, and asks whether medicine can be reclaimed as a genuinely liberating force rather than an instrument of control.