Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
2021, Academia Letters
"From 'The Escaped Lunatic' (1904) to 'Shutter Island' (2010), the psychiatric institution has been a continual presence in American cinema. This dissertation seeks to ask why. Through the study of 110 films (89 viewed), what I am calling the 'screen asylum' emerges as site where madness is both entertaining and entertained. The screen asylum encompasses the full filmic spectrum of genres, budgets, talent and intentions. By treating every appearance of the screen asylum as relevant, approaches based on questions of verisimilitude and stigma can be seen to be counterproductive. Madness is routinely untethered from individual distress requiring treatment and the institution itself is frequently fantastical and filled with excess. The screen asylum is seen as managing the spectator's own anxieties about madness. These anxieties are socio-culturally determined, with the changing face of the screen asylum reflecting historic shifts in the actual psychiatric institution. A line of continuity, from early cinema to the present, can however be traced, wherein the imaginary is screened for view and the actual is screened from view. The screen asylum is therefore a safe space which facilitates the spectator's projection of the state of madness and protection from the fate of madness."
This paper takes as its starting point Peter Sedgwick’s Psycho Politics (1982) in which he called for “more and better” psychiatric treatment in response to significant “anti-psychiatry” movements by patients, carers and clinicians. In the 30 years since he wrote, mental health services have been dramatically reshaped by neoliberalism — where patients are “consumers”, the state demands greater coercion to control “risk”, and Big Pharma has created massive new markets for drug treatments — while public resources have been eroded. Equally, campaigns around psychiatric treatment have often been delimited by and adapted to hegemonic neoliberal frameworks. Does Sedgwick offer us the basis for challenging these reverses and building resistance that can provide renewed hope? And how does his approach square with arguments that, if done right, modern, scientific psychiatry can itself promise liberation?
Being Human: Reflections on Mental Distress in Society
THE RADICAL PSYCHIATRIST AS TRICKSTER2008 •
Drawing on recent attempts to utilise the notion of the ‘trickster’ as a positive force in challenging health and social care practices (e.g. White, 2006), this chapter explores how tensions and contradictions in the mental health system might be creatively explored. I argue that cultivating a ‘trickster sensibility’ is one way of ensuring that the conflicts, uncertainties and ambiguities, inherent in both decisions about mental health care and stories about radical innovations, are foregrounded in our discussions. This could help ensure that such discussions are not artificially and prematurely closed down. I use the idea of the ‘trickster’ in three related ways. First, to refer to ways in which dominant psychiatric discourses and practices have been challenged by particular trickster-like figures, especially psychiatrists themselves. Second, to refer to the ways in which particular stories or narratives about tricksters circulate in particular social contexts to describe or explain a series of real or imagined historical events, as radical failure. Finally, I introduce a third way of viewing the creative potential of the trickster in the modern context. This explores the idea of a ‘trickster politics of tensions’, a politics that is not dependent upon the limitations of individual charismatic figures, but is developed and suffused through various ‘paradoxical social spaces’ (Rose, 1993). As a vehicle to explore these issues, I draw on the history of Paddington Day Hospital, a libertarian therapeutic community in west London (Spandler, 2006). The history of Paddington Day Hospital, and its legacy in Asylum to Anarchy (Baron, 1987), might be regarded as a quintessential ‘trickster story’ in mental health."
Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. It has also served as a metaphor for cultural theorists to interpret modern and postmodern understandings of the self. These radical, compelling, and puzzling appropriations of clinical accounts of schizophrenia have been dismissed by many as illegitimate, insensitive and inappropriate. Until now, no attempt has been made to analyse them systematically, nor has their significance for our broader understanding of this most 'ununderstandable' of experiences been addressed. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry analyses representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy. Part one looks at the foundational clinical accounts of schizophrenia, concentrating on the work of Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler, Karl Jaspers, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Part two examines how these accounts were critiqued, adapted, and mobilised in the 'cultural theory' of R D Laing, Thomas Szasz, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Louis Sass, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Using the aesthetic concept of the sublime as an organising framework, the book seeks to explain how a clinical diagnostic category came to be transformed into a potent metaphor in cultural theory, and how, in that transformation, schizophrenia came to be associated with the everyday experience of modern and postmodern life. Susan Sontag once wrote: 'Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance'. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry does not provide an answer to the question 'What is schizophrenia?', but instead brings clinical and cultural theory into dialogue in order to explain how schizophrenia became 'awash in significance'.
Existential Analysis, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2006
A Road Less Traveled: The Dark Side of R. D. Laing's Conception of Authenticity
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 33, No. 4:595-614, 1997
The Fidelity to Experience in R. D. Laing's Treatment PhilosophyPsyArt: An Online Journal of the Psychological Study of the Arts
Into the 'Zone of the Interior': A Novel View of Anti-Psychiatry2014 •
Psychoanalytic Review, The
Laing and Szasz: Anti-psychiatry, Capitalism, and Therapy2006 •
Journal of Mental Health and Human Behaviour 2013; 18: 9–17.
A longitudinal study of change in prevalence of metabolic syndrome and metabolic disturbances 3 months after clozapine therapySocial Science & Medicine
Ships of fools and vessels of the divine: Mental hospitals and madness, a case study1982 •
The British Journal of Psychiatry
Amygdala activation and symptom dimensions in obsessive-compulsive disorder2014 •
Typifications: The First Step for Clinical Diagnosis in Psychiatry
Typifications: The First Step for Clinical Diagnosis in Psychiatry: Worldy Phenomenology: The Continuing Influence of Alfred Schutz on North American Human Science. Editor: L. Embree
Psychiatric Diagnosis and the Phenomenology of Typification1988 •
Ethnicity and Inequalities in Health and Social Care
Distant voices, still lives: reflections on the impact of media reporting of the cases of Christopher Clunis and Ben Silcock2011 •
American Journal of Psychiatry
The Inseparable Nature of Love and Aggression: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives2012 •
Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing
Exploring the concept of recovery in schizophrenia2005 •
Theory & Psychology
Postpsychiatry and postmodern psychotherapy: Theoretical and ethical issues in mental health care in a Polish context2018 •
Nouvelle psychopathologie & psychanalyse
Anti-psychiatry & anti-psychoanalysis2018 •
2019 •