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Image credit: John Haynes
This symposium explores the history and legacy of the Antipsychiatry movement from the 1960s to today.
A fundraiser for the Psychosis Therapy Project
What can we retain from antipsychiatry’s ambitions and achievements in today’s mental health landscape?
What is the relevance of antipsychiatry’s radical stance on the treatment of severe mental illness or on such issues as racial and social justice?
Three experts in the field will discuss the promises and pitfalls of antipsychiatry as they see it.
Speakers, Titles and Abstracts
Françoise Davoine
Laing’s Legacy on my Psychoanalytic Practice Today
Françoise Davoine will give recent examples of her clinical experience with madness and trauma, which, she reckons, is deeply rooted in her regular visits to the Antipsychiatrist movement in 1971.
Haya Oakley
Still Crazy after all these Years
Following on her celebrated essay on “Life in the Antipsychiatry Fast Lane” (BJP, 2017), Haya Oakley will share her memories of and insights into the Antipsychiatry movement from her privileged frontline perspective. She will look at the legacy of ideals,ideas and lived experience including the movement’s influence on the current work of the Psychosis Therapy Project.
Dr Mohammed Rashed
The Relationship between Antipsychiatry and Mental Health Activism
Drawing on his book Madness and the Demand for Recognition (OUP 2019), Mohammed Rashed will contextualise anti-psychiatry in the broader history of mental health activism. He will note where the two endeavours meet, where they diverge, and how they ought to interact today. He will argue that anti-psychiatry is best understood as an important historical moment, and that contemporary activism should distinguish itself from it in order to focus on the broader aim of cultural transformation in the understanding of madness.
Speakers’ biographies
Françoise Davoine is a psychoanalyst in private practice; she was a member of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris (the psychoanalytic organisation founded by Jacques Lacan) until its dissolution in 1980. She is Professor Emeritus at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris where she led, with Jean Max Gaudillière, a weekly seminar on “Madness and the Social Link,” until Jean Max Gaudillière’s death in 2015. She is Erikson scholar at theAusten Riggs Center, Massachusetts, USA and delivers seminars and lectures in Europe, the US, and Latin America.
Haya Oakley has been practising psychoanalysis in London since 1968. After a brief spell at the David Cooper ‘anti-university’ group, she joined the Philadelphia Association where she worked for many years with R.D. Laing and colleagues training psychotherapists andworking in “therapeutic households.” In 1997, she left the Philadelphia Association and setup, with others, The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She has been a member of the Guild of Psychotherapists since 1982, is a founder member of The College of Psychoanalysis–UK and Honorary Fellow of the UKCP.
Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed is Wellcome Trust ISSF Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London, and Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, King’s College London. Before moving on to full-time research in 2007, Mohammed studied medicine at Cairo University Medical School and trained in psychiatry in London on the Guy’s, King’s College, and St. Thomas’ Hospitals training scheme. He is the author of Madness and the Demand for Recognition: A Philosophical Inquiry into Identity and Mental Health Activism (OUP, 2019). He has published several papers and chapters in philosophy and psychiatry on the concept of mental disorder, the concept of culture, the nature of the diagnostic process, madness and disability, empathy and understanding in mental health, and psychiatric ethics.
