Political pathologies: Psychic life between resistance and restraint

Organized by Hannah Proctor, Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, University of Strathclyde

*

Join us for a two day conference contributing to recent discussions of histories of radical psychiatry, left-wing approaches to psychoanalysis, and critical engagements with the ideological underpinnings of contemporary understandings of mental health. Exploring the implications of both psychic liberation and coercion, the conference will consider the politics of clinical and theoretical approaches to the mind through discussions of the relationships between the emancipatory and the oppressive, the marginal and the dominant, radical experimentation and mainstream orthodoxy within psychiatric institutions and discourses.

Embracing internationalism and interdisciplinarity the conference will encompass papers on theories of trauma, experimental clinicians, radical therapies, forms of care embedded in social movements, the lived experiences of psychiatric patients, and diagnosis and its discontents, bringing into dialogue work on histories and theories of capitalism and anti-captialism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, psychiatry and antipsychiatry.

*

Keynote speaker: Joelle Abi-Rached

Confirmed speakers include: Felicity Callard, Jess Cooper, Robert Chapman, Kate Davison, Micha Frazer-Carroll, Becka Hudson, Amy Lineham, Lucie K. Mercier, Cristian Montenegro, Julianna Pusztai, Evan Sedgwick-Jell, Akshi Singh, Hel Spandler, and members of the Red Therapy Collective.

*

Room SW105, Stenhouse Wing, Strathclyde Business School.

There is step free access. Full accessibility details available here.

Thursday 25 June, 9.30am-5pm

Friday 26 June 2026, 9.30am-3.30pm

Free and open to all - attendees are welcome to attend for as much or as little of the conference as they wish.

Full programme will be announced shortly.

Supported by the Wellcome Trust.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Hannah Proctor