This event is proudly presented in partnership with Bol Co-op. 

Mental health care and its radical possibilities reimagined in the context of its global development under capitalism.

The contemporary world is oversaturated with psychiatric programs, methods, and reforms promising to address any number of “crises” in mental health care. When these fail, alternatives to the alternatives simply pile up and seem to lead nowhere. In Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt, Sasha Warren suggests that the intense contradictions that animate psychiatric care can only be conceptualized by situating its technical composition in its actual social, political, and economic conditions. In an original and compelling account of radical experimentation in psychiatry, Warren traces a double movement in the global development of mental health services throughout the 20th century: a radical current pushing totalizing and idealistic visions of care to their practical limits and a reactionary one content with managing or eliminating chronically idle surplus populations. Moral treatment is read in light of the utopian socialist movement; the theory of communication in the French Institutional Psychotherapy of Félix Guattari is put into conversation with the Brazilian art therapy of Nise da Silveira; the Mexican anti-psychiatry movement’s reflections on violence are thought together with theories of violence developed in Argentinian psychoanalysis and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial therapeutic practice; the social form of the Italian Democratic Psychiatry and Brazilian anti-institutional movements are contrasted with the anti-psychiatry factions of the 1960s–70s North American counterculture.

Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt subverts the divisions between social and biological approaches to mental health or between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. By exploring the history of psychiatry in the context of revolution, war, and economic development, Warren outlines a minor history of approaches to mental health care grounded in common struggles against conditions of scarcity, poverty, isolation, and exploitation.

About the author: Sasha Warren is a writer and mental health worker living in Minneapolis. He writes on psychiatric history, policy, and law on his substack Of Unsound Mind. In March, 2024, he released his first book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt on the history of revolutionary and reactionary psychiatry with Common Notions. He is the cofounder of various projects focused on mental health: the Minnesota chapter of the International Society for Social and Psychological Approaches to Psychosis, the Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry, and Hearing Voices Twin Cities.”

If you’d like to purchase this title online and still support People’s Book, follow the link below:

https://bookshop.org/a/88548/9781942173892

This is an in-person event. Seated capacity at People’s Book is 50 patrons. Standing room is an option. All events are first-come, first-served seating. Accessible seating is always available.