Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness - 9781137460509

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 æwar on terrorÆ in the twenty-first, Psychiatric Hegemony is an uncompromising account of mental health ideology in neoliberal society.

• | Author: Bruce Cohen
• | Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• | Publication Date: Dec 02, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 258 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Psychology
• | ISBN-10: 1137460504
• | ISBN-13: 9781137460509