Reflections On My Work

Schizophrenia and Human Value: Chronic Schizophrenia, Science and Society. Basil Blackwell 1984; paperback edition 1986. 2nd edition, with a new preface, Free Association Books 1993.

Relocating Madness: From The Mental patient to The Person. Free Association Books 1995, paperback edition with new chapter; first published by Routledge in 1991 under the title From the Mental Patient to The Person. Kindle Edition. 2002.

Closing the Asylum: The Mental Patient in Modern Society. Penguin Books 1992. 2nd edition with new chapter 1997.

Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War Yale University Press, 2004. paperback edition 2007

Though I had been much influenced by iconic critiques of orthodox psychiatry from the 1960s such as Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization, Erving Goffman's Asylums, R. D. Laing's The Divided Self, and Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness, overall I did not find in them the resources I felt I needed in developing my understanding of troubled lives. At the end of the 1970s, and in the early 1980s, however, there appeared a number of trailblazing critiques of the foundations of modern epistemology such as Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Then, at the end of the 1980s, there was also Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self.

Taken together, these (and other) works opened up for me a new vista both on the dominant psychiatric tradition (especially the science of schizophrenia), and on schizophrenic lives themselves, that promised to throw light on the problem of the social worth or value of the mentally ill in modern societies. So far as Schizophrenia and Human Value possesses any originality it is, perhaps, in conveying the excitement of discovering the significance of these works for the debate about the nature, meaning and history of schizophrenia.

The other key figure in this book is the Swiss psychiatrist Manfred Bleuler . The late 1970s saw the publication in translation