Honours for Craziness

Frank Cioffi

  • Psycho Politics by Peter Sedgwick
    Pluto, 292 pp, £4.95, January 1982, ISBN 0 86104 352 9
  • The Voice of Experience by R.D. Laing
    Allen Lane, 178 pp, £7.50, April 1982, ISBN 0 7139 1330 4

Peter Sedgwick has given us an informative, penetrating, witty and critical account of anti-psychiatry as represented by Laing, Szasz, Goffman and Foucault. The central ambition of anti-psychiatry has been to replace the so-called medical model of mental illness by a ‘labelling’ one, according to which the behaviours which provoked diagnoses of psychopathology were not manifestations of some underlying pathology but merely conduct found obnoxious by the labellers. Sedgwick counters anti-psychiatry’s startling claim that mental illness is just deviancy with the apparently paradoxical one that illness of any kind is deviancy: ‘The attribution of illness always proceeds from the computation of a gap between presented behaviour (or feeling) and some norm.’

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