Another day goes by and I haven’t sent out a newsletter. I watch the angular curve of new subscribers slow, flatten, and now begin to drop. Still I can’t get myself to write. I guess the people who do not know me know me as a prolific writer. The ones who have guessed my pen names know I’ve come close to a book a year since my first one when I was twenty-three.
I'm currently reading two books on madness from a radical perspective, and so mental health
One is Madness and Civilization from Michel Foucault
The other is Turn Illness into a Weapon from the Socialist Patients' Collective. The book was curiously prefaced by Sartre
Both of them try to expand the critique of psychiatry to a critique of the whole medical regime. I find a downside on Foucault's book that he seemed to assume that madness exist, missing an initial insight that the definition of mad and normal is utterly arbitrary, but also it's interesting to notice Foucault pointing out that madness in a medical way emerged from the imperatives of the work ethics
The SPK was a very interesting revolutionary collective from the 60s who believed that illness is a inevitable condition under capitalism and called for the revolutionary overthrow of the doctor class. It's interesting to notice that in the 60s, psychiatry was largely attacked by the whole revolutionary movement. It's sad that the reaction in the 70s and 80s meant a recovery of psychiatry, and today most radical people tend to take it as even positive
John Holt is the original unschooling guy and it's always surprised me he's not more popular currently. are u familiar with his work? He started off as a pretty mainstream school reformer in the 50s and 60s, but by the end of his career he was just "get your kids out of these places and if you can't afford to get them out, teach them to cheat"
i recommend "learning all the time," "how children learn" or really any of his 10 books. it's kind of pleasantly shocking that something written so long ago and from an (at first) non "political" branded perspective has the clear voice around the insanely vicious regulation and life-sabotage that goes on in schools. i recommend it to anyone interested in "the normative effects of capitalist labor discipline" even if they dont have kids. we were all kids once. i wish i'd read this author in junior high
I'm currently reading two books on madness from a radical perspective, and so mental health
One is Madness and Civilization from Michel Foucault
The other is Turn Illness into a Weapon from the Socialist Patients' Collective. The book was curiously prefaced by Sartre
Both of them try to expand the critique of psychiatry to a critique of the whole medical regime. I find a downside on Foucault's book that he seemed to assume that madness exist, missing an initial insight that the definition of mad and normal is utterly arbitrary, but also it's interesting to notice Foucault pointing out that madness in a medical way emerged from the imperatives of the work ethics
The SPK was a very interesting revolutionary collective from the 60s who believed that illness is a inevitable condition under capitalism and called for the revolutionary overthrow of the doctor class. It's interesting to notice that in the 60s, psychiatry was largely attacked by the whole revolutionary movement. It's sad that the reaction in the 70s and 80s meant a recovery of psychiatry, and today most radical people tend to take it as even positive
John Holt is the original unschooling guy and it's always surprised me he's not more popular currently. are u familiar with his work? He started off as a pretty mainstream school reformer in the 50s and 60s, but by the end of his career he was just "get your kids out of these places and if you can't afford to get them out, teach them to cheat"
i recommend "learning all the time," "how children learn" or really any of his 10 books. it's kind of pleasantly shocking that something written so long ago and from an (at first) non "political" branded perspective has the clear voice around the insanely vicious regulation and life-sabotage that goes on in schools. i recommend it to anyone interested in "the normative effects of capitalist labor discipline" even if they dont have kids. we were all kids once. i wish i'd read this author in junior high