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 a...
