Louis MacNeice
Autumn Journalist
What I was getting at was the increased availability of public institutions to scrutiny compared to their private counterparts. I'm not being nostalgic, looking for the return of some lost social democratic golden age which with just a bit of tweaking can welcome the mad as full members.
However, I am proposing that the social democratic settlement was a genuine improvement on what went before because it opened up to public politics what had previously been held to be private and therefore necessarily apolitical, and in doing so provided some opportunity for the mad to constitute themselves as authoritative, capable political subjects e.g. in organisations such as the Mad Persons Union (MPU).
Of course social democracy didn't have the capacity to seriously engage with self emancipatory organisations such as the MPU (just as it struggled with self aware and assertive rank and file groups of workers), but neither could it completely dismiss them as political actors in their own right, a dismissal which liberalism had previously maintained with great and enduring success.
Cheers - Louis MacNeice
p.s. I write this as someone who has been a user of mental health services (inpatient and out, voluntary and compelled), worked as a volunteer for MIND and had a twenty five year long academic engagement with the study of the coming together of mental health and politics first as a student and then as a lecturer and researcher.
