Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt

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 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 Felix 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 1960s70s 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.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. The White Rat Chapter 2. Barefoot Therapeutics Chapter 3. Demolition Psychiatry Chapter 4. Dreams of Escape Chapter 5. Violence and the Ward Conclusion. Illness and Economy

About the Author :
Sasha Durakov Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis. His experiences within the psychiatric system and commitment to radical politics led him to cofound the group Hearing Voices Twin Cities, which provides an alternative social space for individuals to discuss often stigmatized extreme experiences and network with one-another. Following the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, he founded the project Of Unsound Mind to trace the histories of psychiatry, social work, and public health's connections to policing, prisons, and various disciplinary and managerial technologies.

Review :
“Storming Bedlam presents the history of psychiatry—including bio, social, democratic and demolition psychiatry, as Warren calls it—as a social and political problem. This sharp genealogy is a must read that does not fall into the binary of ‘coercive psychiatry’ versus ‘bad/good anti-psychiatry.’ Instead, it paints a complex picture that analyzes the asylum as a site for critique and experimentation in relation to left movements and revolutions.” —Liat Ben-Moshe, author of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada and Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition “Storming Bedlam is a sweeping work of meticulous, thoughtful scholarship and a welcome addition to the canons of mad studies and critical histories of psychiatry. Navigating deftly and sensitively between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry, Sasha Warren interrogates this binary in its context of late-stage capitalism that defines madness, sanity, and care in terms of labor and surplus, dictating the parameters of our very lives. As Warren writes: ‘We are on fire, and so is the Earth we stand on.’ This deeply important book meets the urgent, burning times we inhabit with the unflinching ‘weeping gaze of the clown.’ Storming Bedlam is a book that inflames the imagination; may it provide fuel and sustenance to all seeking to dismantle oppressive technologies of harm and build a world rooted in true care and collective liberation.”—Leah Harris, psychiatric survivor, activist, and independent journalist “Sasha Warren’s Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt is a thought-provoking book that challenges conventional narratives around psychiatry and anti-psychiatry by uncovering the radical and reactionary forces that have shaped this history. It is a bold and original work of scholarship that invites us to rethink the past, present, and future of psychiatric revolutions.” —Awais Aftab, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University and editor of Conversations in Critical Psychiatry