MSc in Mental HealthMental Health & Social Policy: MSc in Mental Health Mental Health & Social Policy Lecture 4: Critical sociology of mental health 1 Michel Foucault


The Sociology of Mental Health: The Sociology of Mental Health It is my belief that the vast majority of mentally ill people are not 'ill' in the sense proposed by the medical model of illness and its social practices. What such people are, in fact, are the physical manifestation, the 'symptoms', of the oppression, contradictions, and pathologies in the society in which they live. They are a consequence that cannot be cured at the level of the individual. As a result, energies directed towards the treatment of such people, on the basis of a medical model that ignores the wider context, is misdirected, since it can never be more than a form of social control, the adaptation of human beings to the existing perversity of their experience. Greenslade 1992


Key Theorists: Key Theorists Foucault (1961) Madness & Civilization Goffman (1961) Asylums Laing (1970s) Sanity Madness & the family Rosenhan (1973) On being sane in insane places Szasz (1972) The ‘myth’ of mental illness Scheff (1984) Labelling theory


Michel Foucault: Michel Foucault “…in these three areas—madness, delinquency, and sexuality— I emphasized a particular aspect each time: the establishment of a certain objectivity; the development of a politics and a government of the self; and the elaboration of an ethics and a practice in regard to oneself...” Michel Foucault


The History of Madness 1: The History of Madness 1 The history of madness can be divided into four different periods Each period experienced a particular ‘regime of truth’ Medieval Period (750-1450) Madness is holy, a chaotic spiritual force existing outside man and derived from Biblical concepts such as God's will and Satan Enacted in Miracle plays and mimes The Renaissance (1450-1650) Madness is depicted through literature, philosophy and art as something which exists in man. Madness plays a symbolic public role, epitomised by the figure of The Fool, who can subvert reason with folly - demonstrating the madness of reason itself.


The History of Madness 2 The classical age 1650 - 1800 : The History of Madness 2 The classical age 1650 - 1800 The ‘great confinement’ of lunatics, criminals and beggars becomes a common practice. “Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason. By confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing.” The mad were hidden away in asylums, yet those same asylums exhibited their inmates. At the Bethlem hospital in London the lunatics were displayed to almost 100,000 people a year


Hogarth’s Bedlam (1763): Hogarth’s Bedlam (1763)


Madness and Modernity (1800 onwards): The Birth of the Modern Asylum: Madness and Modernity (1800 onwards): The Birth of the Modern Asylum Enlightenment humanist reformers decried the mixing of the mad, the criminal and the poor William Tuke, York Retreat; Pinel in Paris Replacement of idleness with the notion of disease Freud abolished the regime of silence employed and made the mad talk. Talk was mediated by the analyst, the omnipotent and quasi-divine medical figure. Highlights the therapeutic potential of the doctor-patient relationship.


Pinel releasing the insane from their chains (1790s): Pinel releasing the insane from their chains (1790s)


Disciplining the body, managing the mind: Medical interventions in the late 19th & early 20th Century : Disciplining the body, managing the mind: Medical interventions in the late 19th & early 20th Century