Marxism and psychiatry: rethinking mental health politics for the twenty-first century [book review]

The republication of Peter Sedgwick’s book Psychopolitics – 34 years after its first appearance – is a significant event in what is still a backwater of political activism. Sedgwick’s subject was mental illness and, more widely, the psychiatric system of medicalized care for those so diagnosed. For Sedgwick, this represented a neglected but important aspect of social life as sufferers were to be numbered in their millions worldwide and psychiatric welfare apparatuses were a ubiquitous, if largely invisible (in 1982), feature of capitalist states. Sedgwick’s contribution as a Marxist intellectual and activist was to bring to bear a dialectical mode of analysis to surveying this system and the experience of mental illness and, suitably brought up to date, it retains its political relevance today.