Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt

Storming Bedlam reimagines mental health care and its radical possibilities in the context of its global development under capitalism.

We live in a world oversaturated by new mental health programs, methods, and shifts that simply pile up and seem to lead nowhere. Storming Bedlam: Madness, Mental Health, and Revolt suggests that psychiatry must face its repeated failures in the light of its utopian aspirations. Only by doing so can the intense contradictions that animate the world of mental health care be adequately conceptualized and situated as the basis for a future therapeutic practice.

In a radical rereading of the history, theory, and practice of psychiatry under capitalism that emphasizes the utopian thrust of the psychiatric revolution, Storming Bedlam pushes totalizing and often idealistic visions of mental health care to their limits to chart another path. This is the first global and comparative reflection on radical psychiatric currents that ties them directly to the original founding acts of the field. Here, in an original and compelling account of the field's radical history, moral treatment is read in the light of the utopian socialist movement, as the French Institutional Psychotherapy of F幨ix Guattari is put into conversation with Brazilian art therapy of Nise da Silveira, Mexican antipsychiatry's reflections on violence are compared with Argentinian psychoanalysis and Frantz Fanon's anticolonial psychiatric practice, and the Italian Democratic Psychiatry movement and Brazilian anti-institutional politics are contrasted with the North American anti-psychiatry currents beginning in the 1960s-70s counterculture, and more.