Psychopolitics: Peter Sedgwick’s legacy for the politics of mental health
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper re-considers the relevance of Peter Sedgwick’s Psychopolitics (1982) for a politics of mental health. Psychopolitics offered an indictment of ‘antipsychiatry’ the failure of which, Sedgwick argued, lay in its deconstruction of the category of ‘mental illness’, a gesture that resulted in a politics of nihilism. ‘The radical who is only a radical nihilist’, Sedgwick observed, ‘is for all practical purposes the most adamant of conservatives’. Sedgwick argued, rather, that the concept of ‘mental illness’ could be a truly critical concept if it was deployed ‘to make demands upon the health service facilities of the society in which we live’. The paper contextualizes Psychopolitics within the ‘crisis tendencies’ of its time, surveying the shifting welfare landscape of the subsequent 25 years alongside Sedgwick’s continuing relevance. It considers the dilemma that the discourse of ‘mental illness’ – Sedgwick’s critical concept – has fallen out of favour with radical mental health movements yet remains paradigmatic within psychiatry itself. Finally, the paper endorses a contemporary perspective that, while necessarily updating Psychopolitics, remains nonetheless ‘Sedgwickian’. Social Theory & Health (2009) 7, 129–147. doi:10.1057/sth.2009.7
منابع مشابه
Abdi Sanati ( Consultant Psychiatrist , North East London NHS Foundation Trust )
Welcome to the winter 2014 edition of the philosophy SIG newsletter, in which we have the privilege of a contribution by Dr Helen Spandler. As an expert in sociology of mental health, she has provided an insight into the work of Peter Sedgwick (pictured above). In Psychopolitics, Sedgwick predicted the use of anti-psychiatry’s rhetoric by right-wing governments’ in reducing the mental health se...
متن کاملThe cognitive politics of professional conflict: law reform, mental health treatment technology, and citizen self-governance.
متن کامل
Eugenics in the community: gendered professions and eugenic sterilization in Alberta, 1928-1972.
Scholarship on Alberta's Sexual Sterilization Act (1928-1972) has focused on the high-level politics behind the legislation, its main administrative body, the Eugenics Board, and its legal legacy, overlooking the largely female-dominated professions that were responsible for operating the program outside of the provincial mental health institutions. This paper investigates the relationship betw...
متن کاملIntentionality, Politics, And Religion
The idea that intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental or that only mental phenomena have intentionality emerged in the philosophical tradition after Franz Brentano. Much of contemporary philosophy is dedicated to a rejection of the view that mental phenomena have original intentionality. In other words, main strands of contemporary philosophy seek to naturalize intentionality of th...
متن کاملThe Politics of Researching Global Health Politics; Comment on “Knowledge, Moral Claims and the Exercise of Power in Global Health”
In this comment, I build on Shiffman’s call for the global health community to more deeply investigate structural and productive power. I highlight two challenges we must grapple with as social scientists carrying out the types of investigation that Shiffman proposes: the politics of challenging the powerful; and the need to investigate types of expertise that have traditionally been thought o...
متن کامل