History@Elizabeth Newcastle Seminar: Roberts-Pedersen (Newcastle), Psychopolitics: capitalism and the history of mental health.
3 May 2024
Co-hosted by Centre for Study of Violence and Future of Madness Network.
What is the relationship between psychiatry, mental health, and capitalism, and how can these connections be understood historically? In this paper I attempt to extend the conventional association between the rise of industrial capitalism and the expansion of the asylum by sketching a related history in which capitalism is conceptualised as a form of totalising ‘psychopolitics’ - a (mostly) inescapable entanglement of the market and the psyche. As well as outlining the consolidation of this critique in the first decades of the twentieth century, I examine two, more contemporary examples that sustain it into the present: the ‘psychiatrisation’ of work and in particular the notion of ‘burnout’, and the marketisation of emerging digital technologies for the provision of mental health care.
Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research examines the history of psychiatry and medicine as well as the history of warfare. She is the author of Freedom, Faction, Fame and Blood (2010), a study of British foreign fighters in three European wars, and Making Mental Health: A Critical History (2024), an inquiry into the political stakes of psychiatry from the nineteenth century to the present. Her next book, on the concept of mental ‘salvage’ in the Second World War and its aftermath, will appear with Cambridge University Press.
Unless otherwise noted, seminar content © the presenter. Recording © The University of Newcastle. All rights reserved.
History, English, Languages and Screens Website: www.newcastle....
This and other presentation recordings are available from our RU-vid channel, History@Newcastle / @historynewcastle2792
2 окт 2024
