A conversation on the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental ‎illness.‎
Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a ‎style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across ‎Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array ‎of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and ‎others as economic liabilities.
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In this event, critical theorist and historian of science Nima Bassiri will look to the ‎intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought to show how this relationship ‎rendered the most common forms of social valuation - moral value, medical value, and ‎economic value - equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy ‎were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual ‎space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and ‎subsequently redeemed - and even revered.‎
Nima Bassiri is a critical theorist, historian of the human sciences, and assistant professor ‎at Duke University, where he teaches in the Program in Literature, Duke’s interdisciplinary ‎humanities and cultural studies department. He is also co-director of Duke’s Institute for ‎Critical Theory. His first book, Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and ‎the Emergence of Pathological Value, is published by Chicago University Press.
Website: www.nimabassiri.com
Book: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/...
Public Writing: www.thephilosopher1923.org/po...
Marco Ramos is a historian, psychiatrist, and Assistant Professor at Yale University. His ‎historical research focuses on mental health activism and revolutionary politics in Latin ‎America.
Twitter: / mramos_histmed
Public Writing: www.bostonreview.net/articles... ‎