On Sane People In Insane Places was a famous study done by David Rosenhan, a psychologist in America. Central to the study was the question he posed, ‘If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?‘. This seems a pivotal inquiry if billions upon billions of pounds are now involved in psychiatric drugs that are proffered as treatments for what gets described as mental illness. Read more…
The Mad World art exhibition is an aggregation of work by artists, groups, psychologists, psychiatrists, chemists, social workers, and survivors of the psychiatric industry. It starts with the question: Can you work out who here is diagnosed as Mad ? It then introduces a logic problem created by Raymond Smullyan, one of the finest logicians of our time:… Can you work it out ? Read more…
Here is an interview with a retired pharmacist talking about his recollections of pharmacy, psychiatry, social conditions and Scotland. As a dispenser of medications and someone who was trained in the science of medicines, he recollects how trends come in and pass away, how drugs were perceived and taken, and how they were sold. Read more…
Here is an interview with a woman who recounts her experience of being sectioned by her husband. It is intimate and she talks about all the details of how it came about, what it made her feel and what she thinks retrospectively of the experience. She went on to become qualified in the field of psychology and so it presents a particularly interesting perspective on psychiatry. The way that women encounter the world is significantly undermined in many ways. We need only take a look at the difference in the levels of payment women get for equivalent jobs with their male counterparts. This oral history represents a signifier into the gender differentials which can exist around voice and agency. We know from records that in the past single women who had children out of wedlock – also illegitimate children – were often interred in mental asylums for the ‘social inconvenience’ they suggested to the dominant paradigm. Read more…
