Event Time: 11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK
“Madness, Psychiatry, and Economic Reason”
Nima Bassiri in conversation with Marco Ramos
A conversation on the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities.
In this event, critical theorist and historian of science Nima Bassiri will look to the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought to show how this relationship rendered the most common forms of social valuation – moral value, medical value, and economic value – equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed – and even revered. You can find out more and register here.