Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

Cohen, Bruce M. Z.

This book offers a comprehensive Marxist critique of the business of mental health, demonstrating how the prerogatives of neoliberal capitalism for productive, self-governing citizens have allowed the discourse on mental illness to expand beyond the psychiatric institution into many previously untouched areas of public and private life including the home, school and the workplace. Through historical and contemporary analysis of psy-professional knowledge-claims and practices, Bruce Cohen shows how the extension of psychiatric authority can only be fully comprehended through the systematic theorising of power relations within capitalist society. From schizophrenia and hysteria to Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder, from spinning chairs and lobotomies to shock treatment and antidepressants, from the incarceration of working class women in the nineteenth century to the torture of prisoners of the ‘war on terror’ in the twenty-first, PsychiatricHegemony is an uncompromising account of mental health ideology in neoliberal society.

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2020-11-04

Format: Paperback

ISBN-13: 9781349689798

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-46051-6

Dimensions: 210.0cm x148.0cm

Pages: 241.0