Governing Madness – Transforming Psychiatry Disability History and the Formation of Cultural Knowledge in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

In 1975, the German Bundestag published the Psychiatrie-Enquête, a 1,800 pages report, which had been produced over five years by more than 200 experts under the auspices of Aktion psychisch Kranke e.V. The reform movement, which throughout the following 20 years established institutional standards of social psychiatry in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), was strongly influenced by the principles of welfare politics implemented in the states of Northern Europe. However, some minor trajectories of knowledge can be detected and will be discussed in this article. On the level of therapeutic and anthropological thinking, the ongoing and fierce critique of institutionalised psychiatric exclusion in different European countries was accompanied by new arguments of social research and critical theory. On the level of historical awareness, the emerging knowledge of the Nazi genocide and euthanasia led to a memory turn in 1979. Historical research on the so-called forgotten victims supported the acknowledgement and emancipation of psychiatric patients during the 1980s, which could be realised under the new social psychiatry frame. On the level of democratisation, patients’ self-help and -advocacy as well as their networks of support established a strong voice in the public, which since then has to be heard in political decision-making. These three trajectories of (marginalised) knowledge strongly affected cultural democratisation as the necessary platform or general heaven for moving social institutions and political realities. The aim of this paper is to get a clearer image of their conceptual influences on Western Germany’s intellectual and political consciousness in moving social imagination and the democratisation of interactions. The study will work with the de/constructionist cultural approach to disability in order to expound the problems of knowledge discourses and their effects on the constructions of normativity and inequality.