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The Fate of Psychiatry in the New Populism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Peter Sedgwick
Peter Sedgwick*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, University of Leeds
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It has seemed to me and many others that Britain is now entering a political phase in which the post-war consensus around matters of social welfare is being dissolved in favour of a new set of assumptions which emphasize the individual's recourse to law or to legally-embodied appeal procedures, even at the expense of more collective rights which were previously enshrined (imperfectly, it is true, but still definitely) in State-sponsored welfare provision. As I present it here, the implication is made of a fundamental antagonism, perhaps, and more certainly of a serious and unmistakable competition, between the claims of a legally-inspired and individualistic approach and the aspirations of medicine and psychiatry which are grounded in the availability of collective provisions: collective in a double sense, as being both the product of politically organized popular demand and also the expression of structured interventions by the State and other social agencies aligned with the State. It is this dualism between medicine and law, or at a more rarefied level between an individualism founded on contractual civil relations and a collectivism rooted in the institutions of mass democracy and public spending, which I feel needs most justification in argument, and which clearly lacks such justification in the remarks I shall offer here.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the Royal College of Psychiatrists , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , February 1983 , pp. 22 - 25
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1983

References

1 Sedgwick, P. (1982) Psycho Politics. London: Pluto.Google Scholar
2 Webb, A. & Wistow, G. (1981) Whither State Welfare? Policy and Implementation in the Personal Social Services 1979–80. RIPA Studies No 8, London: Royal Institute of Public Administration.Google Scholar
3 Hall, S. (1979) The great moving right show. Marxism Today, January.Google Scholar
4 Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books.Google Scholar
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