Psycho Politics

A classic in the field of mental health, one of the few credible critiques of the anti-psychiatry movement which retains its significance today, Psycho Politics includes scholarly appraisals of the ideas of Goffman, Laing, Szasz and Foucault and proposals for a politics of mental health which neither separates mind and body, nor abdicates responsibility for the alleviation of suffering. Sedgwick argues that mental health movements have overemphasised individual civil liberty at the expense of developing collective responsibility for mental health care. This book has wide ranging implications for political activism, social movements and the future of mental health care. This edition has a new foreword by Helen Spandler (reader in mental health at the University of Central Lancaster), Rob Dellar (founder member of Mad Pride) and Alastair Kemp (Mental Health Survivor activist) placing Sedgwick’s work in context today> This edition also includes for the first time the text of Sedgwick’s 1983 address to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, ‘The Fate of Psychiatry in the New Populism’.