Psychology

Although close to anti-psychiatry’s diagnosis of the social causes of mental illness, the ‘sociogenic’ approaches of the Black and Asian therapeutic community have been largely overlooked. Their reversal of psychiatry’s individualising techniques, argues Howard Slater, reveals the patient to be western society and its endemic racism which imposes a maddening, monohumanist strait-jacket onto the earth’s majority

‘I’d rather be bright mad

Than dull and well.

My complications me excite,

As market logic moulds institutions of learning, treatment and therapy ever more brazenly, co-founder of the Cophenhagen Free University, Jakob Jakobsen, resuscitates some radical histories of deinstitutionalisation, in psychiatry and education, to learn valuable anti-lessons in negation and resistance