Mental health

The Yorkshire County Cricket Club stadium
Letters

Letters—Yorkshire cricket has a long history of anti-Asian racism

Yorkshire County Cricket Club defending racism isn't a surprise
08 November 2021
Socialist Review Archive

How austerity undermined public health across Britain

As COVID-19 continues to inflict terrible damage, it is the privatisation of social care, and the undermining of the NHS, that is the root of the crisis now facing healthcare
27 May 2020
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Reviews & Culture

Politics of the Mind

The crisis of mental health has become a key issue. In an era of brutal cuts to welfare and public services, levels of mental distress and suicide are rising drastically among those out of work. This is as true for low paid workers, women and young people. The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2020...
03 January 2018
Socialist Review Archive

Interview: Marxism and Mental Distress

Author Iain Ferguson spoke to Socialist Review about his new book, Politics of the Mind
27 October 2017
Reviews & Culture

Back to the asylum

The Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition, “Bedlam: the asylum and beyond” asserts a particular take on a central question, the significance of which is easy to overlook due to the sheer volume of thought-provoking material it contains: whether conditions in modern society now require a return to the asylum, albeit a “utopian” one. The exhibition charts...
30 September 2016
Socialist Review Archive

Marxism and psychology

Continuing a strand of debate, Canadian socialist Susan Rosenthal argues that we must look to social rather than individual solutions to mental ill health.
02 February 2016
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Letters

A charter for social justice not for profit

It has been encouraging to follow in Socialist Review the correspondence about how we, as Marxists, understand mental health and respond to the controversies around the relevance of Freudian, and other, ideas. These have also been aired at the debates at the Marxism Festival where users of services and a range of practitioners have engaged...
30 November 2015
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Letters

Mind the trap of biological determinism

John Parrington’s article (Nature, nurture: mind the trap, October SR) ignores the racist use of genetic research and reduces the social problem of mental illness to the micro-level where it cannot be solved. The human brain is not a super-computer, as Parrington claims, but a super-connector that enables collective problem-solving. Blocking our ability to solve...
30 November 2015
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Letters

Don’t deny reality of mental illness

Lucretia Packham’s letter (October SR) replying to my article on Freud contains some rather obscure statements. She agrees with me that it’s important to differentiate the baby from the bathwater in Freud’s work and claims that my attempt to do this is unsuccessful. But she does not offer her own view of the baby/bathwater separation...
02 November 2015
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Letters

Solutions are social

John Parrington’s article ignores the racist use of genetic research and reduces the social problem of mental illness to the micro-level where it cannot be solved. The human brain is not a super-computer, as Parrington claims, but a super-connector that enables collective problem-solving. Blocking our ability to solve problems is a capitalist system that celebrates...
02 November 2015
Socialist Review Archive

From the darkness on all sides

War trauma has been suffered by soldiers for centuries, but it took on a whole new scale during the industrialised slaughter of the First World War. Roddy Slorach exposes the callous treatment of sufferers at the hands of their "superiors".
05 November 2014
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Reviews & Culture

The Last Asylum

In a culture where mental illness still carries much stigma Barbara Taylor’s memoir is an important book about pain and treatment. Taylor, a biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, describes her agonising journey of mental collapse. In the 1980s she began psychoanalysis in order to seek help for her anxiety, depression, insomnia and drinking. She was admitted...
07 July 2014
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Reviews & Culture

The Selfish Capitalist

Oliver James, Vermilion, Oliver James £14.99
01 February 2008
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Socialist Review Archive

Mental Health: Much More Than a ‘State of Mind’

Last month the British Medical Association (BMA) released a shocking report which found that as many as one in ten children and young people between the ages of one and 16 are suffering from a serious mental health problem.
01 July 2006