Stuart Walton
Mad World
Insane
By Rainald Goetz (Translated by Adrian Nathan West)
Fitzcarraldo Editions 349pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
After the Second World War, partly influenced by Michel Foucault’s 1961 history of the institutionalisation of madness, fury at medical bureaucracy developed into an anti-psychiatry movement. Patients subjected to tranquilising pharmaceuticals and electrocution were seen as the hapless victims of harsh disciplinary systems. Mental illness itself was understood as an explicable response to a world hopelessly out of joint.
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