Marxism and psychiatry: rethinking mental health politics for the twenty-first century [book review]

Cresswell, M (2016) Marxism and psychiatry: rethinking mental health politics for the twenty-first century [book review]. Social Theory & Health, 14 (4). pp. 510-523.

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-016-0011-4

Abstract

The republication of Peter Sedgwick’s book Psychopolitics – 34 years after its first appearance – is a significant event in what is still a backwater of political activism. Sedgwick’s subject was mental illness and, more widely, the psychiatric system of medicalized care for those so diagnosed. For Sedgwick, this represented a neglected but important aspect of social life as sufferers were to be numbered in their millions worldwide and psychiatric welfare apparatuses were a ubiquitous, if largely invisible (in 1982), feature of capitalist states. Sedgwick’s contribution as a Marxist intellectual and activist was to bring to bear a dialectical mode of analysis to surveying this system and the experience of mental illness and, suitably brought up to date, it retains its political relevance today.

Item Type: Other
Note:

Full book details - Psychopolitics by Peter Sedgwick Unkant Books, London, 2015, 348 pp. ISBN 9780992650957.

Subjects: H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
J Political Science > JC Political theory
Divisions: School of Sciences
Date Deposited: 17 Apr 2019 12:25
Last Modified: 15 Aug 2021 09:51
ISSN: 1477-8211
URI / Page ID: https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/11881
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