Psychiatric Power and Its Reversals: Can We Keep Practice Humane?

摘要

Iliopoulos' paper is a timely intervention in the current crisis of psychiatry, a crisis that has not yet emerged in fully recognized form (cf Bracken 2008). There are few psychiatrically informed responses to Foucault (see, for example, Bracken [1995] and Roberts [2005]), so it is important for the conversation with Foucault's ideas to develop. Foucault showed those psychiatrists that would listen that power is ubiquitous and inescapable. Although some psychiatrists relish this power, many feel power is thrust upon them, and that they should use it humanely. Following Laing's critique of psychiatry, many people came to psychiatry with the aim of understanding the "mentally ill" with humanity, caring for them as suffering individuals, not simply incarcerating them as part of a universal trope of social hygiene. But power, the Hobbesian Leviathan, leaves you nowhere to hide.