Political Agency And The Medicalisation Of Negative Emotions Dan Degerman by Dan Degerman 9781399504416, 139950441X instant download after payment.

• Provides the first sustained analysis of how the increasing tendency to think and talk about negative emotions in terms of mental disorder affects our ability to take political action
• Presents, analyses and compares case studies of individuals who have faced obstacles related to perceptions of their emotional and mental fitness for public life, ranging from psychiatric service-user activists to Brexit protesters
• Complements Foucauldian studies of medicalisation by drawing on Hannah Arendt to reveal how medicalisation impacts political agency
• Enriches and contests existing interpretations of Arendt

This book explores negative emotions like anger, fear and grief as important drivers of political action. It examines how treating these feelings as medical problems affects society. Drawing on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the book develops an original understanding of political emotions as fragile and vulnerable to attacks disputing their relevance to public life. It presents and analyses four case studies of emotional politics in the UK, ranging from assertions that UKIP supporters were emotionally primitive to diagnoses of anxiety disorder in the Brexit referendum’s aftermath. It demonstrates how ideas of emotion and mental disorder might be used to both empower and disempower people politically.