Writing in The Nation, social psychiatrist Eric Reinhart urges healthcare workers to resist the expansion of ICE into hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes, as well as the war on medical science and federal health programs for vulnerable U.S. residents. The Trump administration is “transforming medicine into a tool of authoritarian repression,” Reinhart contends. He writes that healthcare workers should engage in resistance training and teach-ins, use disobedient documentation and subversive record-keeping, and help educate community members to create a lay caregiving force.
ERIC REINHART
Reinhart is a political anthropologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalytic clinician.
Reinhart told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “Under the second Trump administration, the pace of change has evolved as the administration has been much more competent at rolling out their rightwing agenda. The level of alarm has grown in the U.S. medical community, not purely out of the interests of public health or the protection of vulnerable populations, but also out of concern about the medical profession’s authority. There’s a rallying to defend the establishment; that is not surprising and not all that inspiring. That political awakening is from largely self-interested sources, but it can be used to disobey rules, defy laws and authority. It isn’t just important for the guild or the profession, but also for the possibility of ethical practice. I haven’t before seen this level of political awareness and desire to act in a political mode. The establishment is no longer tenable. We see this also with the unionization of medical residents and fellows, which also comes out of self-interest but has enormous potential to be used beyond the interest of healthcare workers.
“My audience is mostly younger doctors who intuitively think in this way but haven’t been provided a framework to act through their formal education. One of the problems we face in the profession is that we tend to organize amongst ourselves and not with others. There is a strong identification with the profession. But that’s always an inadequate way of thinking. When it comes to responding to ICE raids in Chicago or Los Angeles, health workers are woefully inadequate in terms of a broader community response within this intensifying emergency in the U.S. What I really hope is that in this moment, doctors partner with legal and mutual aid networks toward a broader vision of social care that includes medical care. I am hoping that this context will broaden the vision of what organizing looks like for physicians.
“This work cannot happen all out in the open. I wonder what happens when it’s advertised. Recently, the [Chicago] Sun-Times ran a piece about a network of physicians who are providing gender-affirming care outside of the institutions that have typically done this. The piece named those physicians and identified them. This work needs to be visible enough to inspire others, but we also need to be strategic, as a medical community and as journalists aligned with these goals, to protect the identity of doctors and the patients who come to them. Secrecy is an important part of this––but secrecy is foreign to the medical profession, where everything is about transparency and legality.”