The politics of experience

1
The politics of experience

• Dangerous knowledge in (anti)psychiatry

2
Power/knowledge

• authorization
• the making of truths
• the legitimization of control
• the case of anti-psychiatry siding with the
  patient
• subversive knowledge
• anti-authoritarian stance
• oppositional movement
• alternative power/knowledge

3
The experience of madness

• the discomfort of unintelligible behavior
• stress and anxiety
• lack of control
• strategies of control
• physical or moral restraint
• interpretations of otherness as
• possession
• mental illness
• social deviance

4
Illness as a metaphor

• application of the medical model
• personal experience as a symptom
• psychiatry as authorized power/knowledge
• madmen as patients ? medical objects
• variety of therapies
• ranging from physical interventions to talking
  cures

5
Re-reading Laing (1927-1989)

• Meanings of madness
• The Divided Self An Existential Study in Sanity
  and Madness (1960)
• the intelligibility of psychotic behavior
• Sanity, Madness and The Family Families of
  Schizophrenics (1964)
• ? the pathology of family communication
• The Politics of Experience (1967)
• ? schizophrenia as a radical trip

6
Anti-psychiatry

• radical humanism ?? medical oppression
• revolutionary politics ?? cultural conformism
• madness as a superior state ?? one-dimensional
  men
• Do not adjust your mind,
• there is a fault in reality

7
The dangers of anti-psychiatry

• exposing the discomforts of psychiatry
• its problematic status as a science
• the tension between control and treatment
• its dubious public image
• putting patients at risk
• glorification of suffering
• lack of protection
• self-destructive radicalism
• over-interpretation of mental illness
• guruism and the lack of political realism

8
Conclusions

• anti-psychiatry as subversive power/knowledge
• challenging the canons of psychiatry DSM,
  biological psychiatry and objectification of
  patients experiences
• exposing the rationality of irrationality and the
  irrationality of rationality
• political amplification of patients knowledge
• antipsychiatry as a movement
• was it fun while it lasted?
• the power of authorized knowledge