Abstract
Benefit claimants have been at the focal point of neoliberal economic policy under successive governments for nearly twenty-five years, but the banking crisis of 2008 reinvigorated government attempts to cut benefit spending. This has deepened divisions and inequalities in British society, as disabled people and those with mental health problems unable to work, are coerced by an increasingly authoritarian regime to seek low-paid work or unsuitable jobs based in zero hours contracts. One consequence of these developments is a resurgence of interest in the ideas of Peter Sedgwick, whose book Psycho Politics, set out a Marxist critique of antipsychiatry (including Foucault's early work) and the consequences of neoliberalism for people with mental health problems.
This paper outlines Sedgwick's main arguments, and together with Foucault's later work, questions the underlying principles of neoliberalism. Of particular significance is a shift in the governmental function of psychology and psychotherapy from the employed to the unemployed. This is exemplified by the use of psychocompulsion, a set of theories and practices aimed at reducing the numbers of benefit claimants. Finally, the paper examines the difficulties in developing alliances between mad people and others opposed to benefit cuts. It ends with a brief account of the resistance to neoliberal austerity by the radical mental health survivor group, Recovery in the Bin.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Pat Bracken, Mick McKeown, Jeremy Pritlove, Helen Spandler and colleagues involved with Recovery in the Bin for comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Philip Thomas is a volunteer with a charity in a northern British town that helps refugees and asylum seekers to rebuild their lives. He is also Vice-Chair and co-founder of another charity working with people from diverse communities with mental health problems. He was previously a consultant psychiatrist for many years, when he was a founder member and co-chair (until 2011) of the Critical Psychiatry Network. He was also a Professor of Philosophy, Diversity and Mental Health at the University of Central Lancashire. He has written or co-authored four books on philosophy and mental health, and dozens of academic papers on philosophy, culture and madness. As a psychiatrist, Philip’s work was high profile, his work featuring in a Horizon documentary on ‘Hearing Voices’. His work featured on BBC Radio 4′s All in the Mind on three occasions, on hearing voices, postpsychiatry (his third book co-authored with Pat Bracken), and his work with Pat in Bradford. Philip is now a writer.
Notes
1. ‘Psychopolitics in the Twenty-first Century: Peter Sedgwick and Radical Movements in Mental Health’, conference at Liverpool Hope University, 10 June 2015 (http://www.hope.ac.uk/psychopoliticsc21/#sthash.7A29CYLT.dpufhttp://www.hope.ac.uk/psychopoliticsc21/).
2. This should not be interpreted to mean that Sedgwick supported the biomedical model of mental illness.
4. The Black Triangle group campaigns for the human rights of British disabled people at a time when the press and media frequently refer to people on benefits as ‘work-shy’, and disability hate crime is on the increase. Their name is taken from the black triangles that disabled people were forced to wear in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Such people were classified as ‘Arbeitsscheu’ (work-shy). See http://blacktrianglecampaign.org/about/.
5. In June 2015 the Department of Work and Pensions introduced a pilot scheme in south London that relocated the local community mental health team to the job centre, with the provision of ‘therapy’ based on positive psychology for benefit claimants.
6. While some may find such approaches helpful, the issue here is that many do not, and it is thus grossly unethical to force those who, for various reasons, are opposed to ‘positive psychology’ to accept this by threatening to withdraw their benefits.
7. Margaret Thatcher, reported in Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987.
8. This is reflected in the popularity in Britain of TV series like Dragon’s Den, in which young entrepreneurs have an opportunity to present their business plans to a group of wealthy potential investors.
9. These were reinstated in the recent translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (Foucault, Citation2006).
10. They have been available as a series of audiotapes, but there is no evidence that Sedgwick was aware of them, or indeed studied them. See http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/foucault/nb.html.
11. Early in his academic life, Foucault joined the French Communist Party some time in 1948 under the influence of his mentor, Louis Althusser, but then left five years later. See Macey (Citation1995) and also Miller (Citation1993).
12. And which may also be read into the ‘kinder’ participatory politics advocated by Jeremy Corbyn.
13. McKeown and Spandler (Citation2015) do not propose the abandonment of deliberative democracy as a tool in building alliances, rather that it requires adaptation and modification to make it possible for mad people to contribute.
14. See https://www.facebook.com/groups/711653172207623/ – the group was formed in January 2015, and by November its membership had grown to over 600.