Chapter 4 - Mad Protesters: Raging with Occupy

Summary

This chapter explores the role of anger and medicalisation in the Occupy movement. Occupy has been among the most widespread protest movements so far in the twenty-first century. It emerged when the Arab Spring was at a high point. In Tunisia and Egypt, people had successfully risen against oppressive and entrenched dictators. Meanwhile, the West was still reeling from the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Many were depressed (affectively and economically), worried about the future, and outraged at the extreme inequality that the Great Recession uncovered. Briefly, it seemed as though Occupy could ignite a Western Autumn. That did not happen, of course. Ultimately, as some would have it, ‘cooler heads’ prevailed and Occupy came to an end. The movement was not a complete failure. For one, it contributed significantly towards the repoliticisation of economic inequality (Bailey 2017: 181), which has been palpable in recent elections both in the United Kingdon and the United States. But in other ways, it did fail. Within six months, the movement's occupations of public spaces across the world had been cleared out, often through court order and the protesters’ demands were largely ignored. Many factors might have contributed to these failures. Samuel Burgum (2018), for example, suggests that neoliberal values like individualism were to blame, partly because these values made external publics unreceptive to Occupy's messages, partly because the activists unwittingly reproduced these values in their actions.

In this chapter, I contend that the medicalisation of negative emotions may have been another such factor. More specifically, drawing upon activist accounts, news coverage and court records, I argue that psychiatric concepts functioned as disempowering factors that undermined Occupy protesters’ credibility, affiliations and access to public spaces. However, most of the examples in this chapter do not involve the kind of explicit medicalising attacks on negative emotions that we saw in the Brexit case. Instead, they elucidate a more indirect kind of medicalising attack, one that disempowers by emphasising the presence of people with mental disorder within a movement, implying that something must be wrong with the movement if it attracts such people. Such attacks are facilitated by the general medicalisation of negative emotions but do not disempower primarily by medicalising emotions. Nevertheless, these attacks can medicalise emotions just as surely as those that target emotions explicitly.