Psychiatric Abolition: Deinstitutionalisation and Containment

Drawing from first-hand experiences of front-line mental healthcare work and the theories and practices of institutional psychotherapy, this talk will address the current of abolitionist activism that confronts the violence of mental healthcare in the UK and the US. While the evidence of the harm produced by psychiatric treatments makes the call for abolition increasingly more prescient, few accessible alternatives have been offered. This talk will look to synthesize historic therapeutic alternatives to carceral psychiatric treatment with current steams of mad activism of psychiatric survivors to think through how - and indeed if - psychiatric abolition can be brought about. Ultimately, this talk will seek to develop a framework derived from critical humanities, disability studies, and psychological studies research for a boundary approach to abolition.