Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt
A conversation with Sasha Warren and Vail Varone
Storming Bedlam reimagines mental health care and its radical possibilities in the context of its global development under capitalism.
The contemporary world is oversaturated with new psychiatric programs, methods, and reforms promising to address any number of "crises" in mental health care. When they fail, alternatives to the alternatives simply pile up and seem to lead nowhere.
In a radical rereading of the history, theory, and practice of psychiatry, Storming Bedlam emphasizes the utopian origins of the psychiatric revolution and its roots in the political and economic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Warren traces a double movement in the global development of mental health services from its origins through the 20th century.
Chronicling and comparing these movements, Storming Bedlam, subverts the divisions between social and biological approaches to mental health and between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. By exploring the history of psychiatry in the context of revolution, war, and economic development, Warren approaches mental health care grounded in common struggles against conditions of scarcity, poverty, isolation, and exploitation.
“Brilliant synthesis and vital reading for anyone interested in a left politics of Madness.”
—Robert Chapman, author of Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism
Sasha Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis. His experiences within the psychiatric system and commitment to radical politics led him to cofound the group Hearing Voices Twin Cities, which provides an alternative social space for individuals to discuss often stigmatized extreme experiences and network with one-another. Following the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, he founded the project Of Unsound Mind to trace the histories of psychiatry, social work, and public health's connections to policing, prisons, and various disciplinary and managerial technologies.
Vail Varone is a psychiatric survivor, fiction writer, and community organizer based at Brooklyn’s Glitter House.