Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hilton, Leon J

Titel

Psychopower and Psychopolitics

Ist Teil von

• American quarterly, 2021-06, Vol.73 (2), p.389-402

Ort / Verlag

College Park: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Cooper—a white South African psychiatrist turned revolutionary critic of the repressive tendencies of psychiatric orthodoxies—wrote that the Dialectics of Liberation Congress was organized out of the idea that any "talk of revolution today" would be "meaningless unless we effect some union between the macro-social and micro-social, and between 'inner reality' and 'outer reality. [...]his efforts to respond to the emphasis on the psychological liberation of the individual that had dominated the Congress are notable, because they were made at a turning point in the history of psychiatry and the politics of mental health care. Jonathan Metzl's important study The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease examined the archived medical records of a single Michigan mental asylum from the 1930s through the 1970s,8 which revealed how schizophrenia went from being a diagnosis that was most frequently given to middle-class white women who were committed to psychiatric institutions (often by their husbands or other family members) in the prewar period to a diagnosis almost exclusively assigned to Black men who were institutionalized and incarcerated as the civil rights and Black Power movements of the late 1960s coalesced. "11 Yet what might be called psychopolitics is also produced out of the sometimes delicate, sometimes forceful struggle for control between the diagnostic institution and the subject of diagnosis.12 Indeed, as Foucault went on to insist, the term antipsychiatry itself can describe "any movement by which the question of truth is put back in play within the relationship between the mad person and the psychiatrist.