Soviet psychiatry and American psychiatry have different histories. Yet, both were conceived, each in their own way, as instruments of control aimed at repressing deviant behavior.
In the 20th century, being labelled as “schizophrenic” was tantamount to a life sentence. A study based on patient records shows that schizophrenics suffered not only from their illness but also from ideological prejudice and the classificatory obsession of their time.
There are currently two million prisoners in the USA, and the use of high security solitary confinement is on the increase. The violence of this procedure and its dramatic effects, in particular on the youngest inmates or those suffering from psychiatric conditions, has now sparked a public debate.
Michael Jackson was a lot more than just a singer: Sylvie Laurent recounts the story of the pop star who became a “monster,” whose quest for white-skinned androgyny reveals in several respects the agonizing indecision of the African-American community in the face of racism and sexism.
There was a time when a criminal judged to be ‘insane at the time of committing an offence’ was neither to be punished nor imprisoned. Since the 1980’s, the number of those judged to be criminally insane has been on the increase in French prisons. Is this because prison exacerbates pre-existing pathologies? Or perhaps that psychiatry is increasingly struggling to deal with difficult patients.
In the United States starting in the 1950s, schizophrenia ceased being a malady of rural and idle whites, to become increasingly associated with blacks coming from the inner cities. This over-diagnosis is related to the struggle for civil rights and the foregrounding of militants who were judged to be aggressive.
