Power and the Psychiatric Apparatus

Book excerpt: Drawing on a broad range of approaches in the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, history, philosophy, medicine and nursing, Power and the Psychiatric Apparatus exposes psychiatric practices that are mobilized along the continuum of repression, transformation and assistance. It critically examines taken for granted psychiatric practices both past and current, shedding light on the often political nature of psychiatry and reconceptualizing its central and sensitive issues through the radical theory of figures such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Goffman, and Szasz. As such, this ground-breaking collection embraces a broad understanding of psychiatric practices and engages the reader in a critical understanding of their effects, challenging the discipline’s altruistic rhetoric of therapy and problematizing the ways in which this is operationalized in practice. A comprehensive exploration of contested psychiatric practices in healthcare settings, this interdisciplinary volume brings together recent scholarship from the US, Canada, the UK, Europe and Australia, to provide a rich array of theoretical tools with which to engage with questions related to psychiatric power, discipline and control, while theorizing their workings in creative and imaginative ways.