Authors’ Introduction

Abstract

This book is about the experience of mental health workers and its relevance to both politically informed therapeutic work and wider political practice. It is founded on two beliefs: that being a socialist can have a meaning for workers in the field of mental health, and that the experience of those workers has something to offer a socialist politics. Neither of these claims may seem very controversial. After all, isn’t the hallmark of socialism its recognition of the links between personal distress and social organisation? Isn’t the principle well established that the personal is the political, the political the personal? The principle perhaps, but faced with the suffering of a client or the political reality of the 1980s, the uncomfortable fact is that neither of these beliefs seems so self-evidently true — a sign that theory and practice have become separated, to the detriment of both.