PsychoPolitics

An impassioned critique of mental health movements from one of the left’s most important thinkers on health

'A powerful and impassioned defence of psychiatry, urging the Left to confront the harsh realities of mental illness' - William Davis, author of The Happiness IndustryA new edition of one of the most significant and credible critiques of the anti-psychiatry movement. As relevant today as it was when first published in 1982, the book changed the conversation on mental health and illness, demanding that we assess its relationship to the wider decay of social institutions. Dissecting the work of popular anti-psychiatric thinkers, Erving Goffman, R.D. Laing, Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, Sedgwick exposed the conservative undercurrents and false hopes represented by the alternative psychiatry of the sixties and seventies, challenging the very real impact it had on our collective responsibility to look after the mentally ill. With a new introduction that highlights the relevance of Sedgwick’s demands for modern mental health movements, the practice of psychiatry and for left-wing activists, this new edition further cements PsychoPolitics’ cult classic status.