When: Friday, July 5, 2024, 10:00 AM - 4:00 PMWhere: Senior Common Room, ArtsTwo Building, Queen Mary University of London, 335 Mile End Road, London E1 4FQ
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This workshop will bring together leading thinkers, writers, practitioners, and activists to reflect on the transformations that the critique of psychiatry and its allied fields has undergone since the heyday of anti-psychiatry in the 1960s.
How has the critique of psychiatric knowledge, the pharmaceutical industry, and institutions in Western society transformed and transmuted in the intervening decades, in the altogether different landscape in which we find ourselves? This will be an opportunity to explore the quandaries, paradoxes, and dilemmas of our contemporary psychiatric relationship.
A particular quandary characterises contemporary Western society’s relationship to psychiatry. The old certainties of 1960s and 70s anti-psychiatry no longer apply; nor does a default suspicion of pharmaceuticals, and psychiatric and psychological language permeates the public and private sphere to a perhaps unprecedented extent. What has happened to the critique of psychiatry that was once so visible? How has it been transformed? A pervasive cultural and policy trend towards ‘destigmatising’ mental illness sits alongside a growing embrace of psychiatric diagnostic concepts that circulate virally on social media. (Naomi Klein has described the world we live in as one ‘very generous with diagnoses and awfully stingy with actual help’.) This despite the well-documented ruthless marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry, and its stranglehold on research, and despite too the paucity of rationale for the supposed mechanisms of many psychiatric drugs. A sustained critique of medical and psychiatric power more generally has waned, and, as the rise of populist politics and conspiracy theories has shown, the critique of medical power has largely been ceded to the right. Unevidenced theories about pharmaceuticals have taken up the space emptied out by a left that has been increasingly reluctant to provide a rigorous critique of pharmaceutical and psychiatric power. What’s more, demedicalising approaches to distress are being instrumentalised to deny individuals benefits, just as they have often been harnessed to individualised neoliberal exhortations to empowering oneself and getting back to work. Chronically decaying investment in welfare state and support systems dovetail with the very real need that pharmaceuticals end up fulfilling in under-invested mental healthcare systems.
A recognition that populations need whatever help they can get, when neoliberal states enamoured of cost-saving notions of personal responsibility make life unbearable for so many, does not necessarily reflect a belief in any ontological claims about the nature of mental illness or the action of pharmaceuticals. A new critique of contemporary healthcare might strategically embrace forms of help (such as pharmaceuticals) that are made necessary in the absence of better social policy, and might speak to the appeal of socially-minded psychotherapies as an alternative to the criminal justice system. Historian Danielle Carr has evoked the contemporary dilemma neatly when she writes, wryly, that ‘there is no strong welfare state coming to force healthcare on us – if only’. But what of our relationship to the professions, industries, and concepts that nonetheless govern and manage our psychic lives? This workshop will bring together leading thinkers and practitioners to explore the quandaries, paradoxes, and dilemmas of this contemporary psychiatric relationship.
Dr Sanah Ahsan, Clinical Psychologist, broadcaster, writer, author of I cannot be good until you say it, Bloomsbury 2024)
Professor Felicity Callard (University of Glasgow), Human Geography, interdisciplinary scholar in the medical humanities, history of the human sciences, and science and technology studies
Nick Dearden, Director of Global Justice Now and author of Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health, Verso 2023
Han Dee, PhD LAHP student at Queen Mary University of London, 'The Life and Times of a High-Security Psychiatric Patient'
Barry Watt, psychoanalyst (UKCP) and Co-Director of the Psychosis Therapy Project, London
The workshop is organised by IHSS Fellow Dr Katherine Angel (School of English and Drama), Queen Mary University of London.
Lunch and refreshments will be served.
All are welcome but please sign up on Eventbrite.