Dissecting multiple stigma(s) in primary mental health care (original) (raw)
Related papers
1985
The refusal of power The purposes of therapy Supervision, personal therapy and radical therapists 156 6 The Community Strategy 165 Fetishising the community The penetration of community life Knowledge and control Resistance Conclusion 191 References Index 200 Many people have helped us with this book , either directly or indirectly, through inspiring us to think and work in particular ways. We would especially like to thank the other members of the Lambeth and Southwark Community Mental Health Group. We are also indebted to Paul Hoggart and Sue Holland, members of the Battersea Action and Counselling Centre, which was the predecessor of the Lambeth and Southwark group. Peter Leonard's comments after our first draft were very significant in enabling us to pull our ideas together more cogently and in forcing us to do some political work which had been carefully avoided. Steven Kennedy's editorial comments have also been helpful at various points along the way. Finally, we would like to thank julian and j 0' s housemates for putting up with our weekly meetings for so long, and julian's mum for lending us her house for a weekend that turned out to be important in the life of the group.
Psychopolitics: Peter Sedgwick's legacy for the politics of mental health
Social Theory & Health, 2009
This paper re-considers the relevance of Peter Sedgwick’s Psychopolitics (1982) for a politics of mental health. Psychopolitics offered an indictment of ‘antipsychiatry’ the failure of which, Sedgwick argued, lay in its deconstruction of the category of ‘mental illness’, a gesture that resulted in a politics of nihilism. ‘The radical who is only a radical nihilist’, Sedgwick observed, ‘is for all practical purposes the most adamant of conservatives’. Sedgwick argued, rather, that the concept of ‘mental illness’ could be a truly critical concept if it was deployed ‘to make demands upon the health service facilities of the society in which we live’. The paper contextualizes Psychopolitics within the ‘crisis tendencies’ of its time, surveying the shifting welfare landscape of the subsequent 25 years alongside Sedgwick’s continuing relevance. It considers the dilemma that the discourse of ‘mental illness’ – Sedgwick’s critical concept – has fallen out of favour with radical mental health movements yet remains paradigmatic within psychiatry itself. Finally, the paper endorses a contemporary perspective that, while necessarily updating Psychopolitics, remains nonetheless ‘Sedgwickian’
Psychiatric Bulletin
Returning to the Fray: Revisiting what Social Science Can Offer Psychiatry … and vice versa
Historical accounts establish without doubt that a set of social disruptions-variously described as madness, possession, lunacy, mental illness, mental disorder or mental health difficulties-are an inevitable feature of organised society. They also establish that time has seen a series of approaches to them come and go. That equally applies to the medical approach which has dominated Western practice for much of the last half century (Scull 2015). By accepting responsibility for " mental health difficulties " medicine has provided the field with a welcome certainty. As we outline, there are grounds to doubt the assumptions upon which this is founded, and so although " mental health difficulties " may be inevitable, there is growing uncertainty about how they might best be construed, conceptualised and addressed. That uncertainty could be an opportunity for social scientists of both practical and theoretical persuasions to return to a field where they once made seminal contributions (see for instance Goffman 1961 and Rosenhan 1973). Currently psychiatry and social science have a fraught relationship. Although psychiatry could be a rich opportunity for social scientists to make singular humanitarian contributions and a field of research brimming with practical and theoretic challenges, the relationship between the two has been difficult for several decades. Anne Rogers and David Pilgrim provide a helpful account of its ebbs and flows by considering three areas: Barriers to Collaboration, Stigma, and Psychoanalysis (Rogers and Pilgrim 2013), and we begin by revisiting that discussion. Many of the difficulties reflect the fact that social theory and psychiatry seek to understand human behaviour and its difficulties by using entirely different explanatory frameworks, and from within entirely different institutional settings. Arguably this has conspired to generate an unhelpful set of tribal distinctions which debilitate both as academic disciplines and limit the philanthropic contributions each could otherwise provide. There are good reasons to believe that reconciliation could and should be possible, and in particular that this offers rich opportunities for social scientists to re-engage; to return to the fray. There are widely expressed concerns about the nature and quality of provision for people with " mental health difficulties " that challenge conventional approaches, and reach out for an alternative (see for instance Moncrieff 2009,