Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Bracken, Pat, and Philip Thomas. “From Szasz to Foucault: On the Role of Critical Psychiatry.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 17, no. 3 (2010): 219-228. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/405314

Abstract
Because psychiatry deals specifically with ‘mental’ suffering, its efforts are always centrally involved with the meaningful world of human reality. As such, it sits at the interface of a number of discourses: genetics and neuroscience, psychology and sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and the humanities. Each of these provides frameworks, concepts, and examples that seek to assist our attempts to understand mental distress and how it might be helped. However, these discourses work with different assumptions, methodologies, values, and priorities. Some are in dispute with one another. At various times in the history of psychiatry, a particular form of understanding has become dominant and worked to marginalize .

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