Somewhere between the heyday of the lobotomy and today’s reliance on psychopharmaceutical solutions to mental illness lies the America of the 1960s and 1970s, an era marked by intense, critical examination of institutions and assumptions. Not surprisingly, during this time, psychiatry—its methods and very foundations—were questioned.
Charting the complex arc of the profession’s reputation and sometimes repudiation is Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social (1948-80), written by Michael E. Staub, professor of English and director of Baruch’s Feit Seminar Program. “No period in American history witnessed as much critical attention and cultural energy lavished on issues relating to madness as the 1960s and 1970s,” writes Staub in the introduction. “Not only medical literature but also popular films and music, plays and novels, performance art, and mainstream news media and popular magazines discussed and represented mental illness and the asylum almost incessantly.”
How did Staub, whose previous book, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (which explores what it means to be a woman deployed on the ground in Iraq), decide to write a book about the Antipsychiatry Movement? “I read Knots by R.D. Laing as a teenager in the 1970s and was fascinated . . . It was quite the bestseller. And, then, a few years ago, I literally stumbled on a several-volume album recording from the late 1960s of something called the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, held in London. The album got me interested in the so-called ‘Antipsychiatry Movement,’ which I had not officially known as such. From there I found a book by Peter Sedgwick called Psycho Politics (published in the early 1980s), which seemed dated—if still fascinating. This led me to research a lot of the same material as Sedgwick, though I found myself coming up with my own analyses and interpretations.”
In Madness Is Civilization, Staub takes the reader back to “a moment when a significant portion of the populace . . . believed madness to be a plausible and sane reaction to insane social conditions.” For the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, accounts of mental illness operated not only as a subject in their own right but as “an occasion for addressing a host of other political, emotional, and social concerns.”
Madness was metaphor, and the mental patient stood in for everyman and -woman bucking the system. Had that system constructed “mental illness” to protect and perpetuate itself? Or was the system itself the cause of mental illness, and were psychiatrists merely the “mechanics of coercion”? Ultimately at issue became the rights of people systematically denied rights, not only the mentally ill but women, gays, and minorities.
Further engaging the reader are portraits of the movement’s renegade psychiatrists, who became some of the era’s darling public intellectuals—Thomas Szasz, Erving Goffman, and R.D. Laing.
Madness Is Civilization touches on so many essential, interconnected themes that it is bound to engage anyone curious about social trends in the 20th century.
—Diane Harrigan
Learn more by listening to Professor Staub’s extensive interview with BBC Radio 4.