Mark Cresswell
Biographic Data
| ID | 364674 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Cresswell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Cresswell |
| SIGNATURE | CRESSWELL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8503-7117 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Disease, climate, environment and the fortunes of Buddhism during the Tibetan Empire 618–842 CE
The official adoption of Buddhism by the Tibetan state in the mid-8th Century (761-762 CE) was relatively late compared to its permeation from northern India to elsewhere in south and east Asia, due to the country’s geographical isolation. Whilst reasons for its adoption remain uncertain, it is thought that the religion provided a strong unifying influence permitting both the consolidation and subsequent expansion of the Tibetan Empire. Early his…
Sawyer’s Theory of Social Causation
This article critiques R. Keith Sawyer’s theory of social causation from his 2005 book Social Emergence. It considers his use of analogy with the philosophy of mind, his account of individual agency, the legacy of Emile Durkheim, the concepts of supervenience, multiple realization, and wild disjunction, and the role of history in social causation. Sawyer’s theory is also evaluated in terms of two examples of empirical research: his own micro-soci…
Self-harm and moral codes in emergency departments in England
Szasz, Thomas S. (1920–2012)
The Hungarian‐born, US‐based psychiatrist Thomas S. Szasz, was the author of The Myth of Mental Illness . He was a key figure in the antipsychiatry movement from the 1960s onward. He argued that the concept of mental illness was false and unscientific and that the lawful incarceration of individuals on mental health grounds was morally wrong. His views remain controversial and he has been criticized on philosophical, moral, and sociological groun…
Social movements, historical absence and the problematization of self-harm in the UK, 1980–2000
This article engages Bhaskar's category of absence and Foucault's notion of problematization in the context of explaining an example of the historical emergence of political activism. Specifically, it considers the emergence of the ‘psychiatric survivors’ social movement in the UK, with a focus on the ‘politics of self-harm’. The politics of self-harm refers to acts of self-injurious behaviour, such as drug over-dosage or self-laceration, which d…
Solidarities and tensions in mental health politics
Recent years have seen a resurgence in radical mental health politics and accompanying social movements. This article identifies two tendencies. The first, the Mad Studies tendency, indicts psychiatry as a branch of medicine and asserts a politics of identity based upon the experience of ‘madness’. The second, the Psychopolitics tendency, defends the value of welfare and medicine and asserts a politics of alliance between service users and mental…
Marxism and Psychiatry
Psychopolitics today
We welcome Tad Tietze’s recent work building upon the political legacy of Peter Sedgwick (Tietze, this issue). Both Tietze and ourselves have been part of the recent resurgence of interest in Sedgwick, especially the relevance of his work to the politics of mental health. While our response here is quite critical, we are keen to be rowing in the same ‘Sedgwickian’ direction. Although it is gratifying that Tietze calls us ‘key inheritors’ of Sedgw…
The Engaged Academic
This paper considers some political and ethical issues associated with the ‘academic intellectual’ who researches social movements. It identifies some of the ‘lived contradictions’ such a role encounters and analyses some approaches to addressing these contradictions. In general, it concerns the ‘politico-ethical stance’ of the academic intellectual in relation to social movements and, as such, references the ‘theory of the intellectual’ associat…
Psychopolitics
Psychiatric Survivors and Experiential Rights
Human rights may be categorised as belonging to ‘three generations’: political, social and ‘solidarity’ rights. This paper considers this schema theoretically, deploying the example of the ‘psychiatric survivor’ movement in Britain in support of its central claims. Psychiatric survivors comprise groups of psychiatric patients who have campaigned both for political and social rights in addition to a singular form of ‘right’, which is referred to h…
Empirical Methods in Short-term Climate Prediction - By Huug van den Dool
Szasz and His Interlocutors
It is a matter of some irony that psychiatry's most trenchant critic for over four decades is himself a psychiatrist. I refer to Thomas S. Szasz. Szasz's core thesis may be succinctly rendered: mental illness is a “myth”, a “metaphor” which serves only to obscure the social and ethical “problems in living” we face as human beings. This paper reconsiders the conceptual bases of Szasz's assault on psychiatry and assesses recent counter‐arguments of…
Self-Harm ‘Survivors’ and Psychiatry in England, 1988–1996
Psychiatric "survivors" and testimonies of self-harm
UK "Psychiatric Survivors"-a variety of activist groups comprising individuals who have been on the "receiving end" of psychiatric treatment-have, since the mid-1980s, mounted a challenge to the psychiatric system. "Survivors" have formulated their own knowledge-base concerning a range of human problems hitherto regarded as the province of "official" psychiatry only. "Official" knowledge stresses scientific classification, professional expertise,…
Sex/Gender
This article is a challenge to Mary Riege Laner's exhortation to 'Let sex be sex and let gender be gender' as expressed recently in the pages of Sociological Inquiry (Laner 2000, p. 471). I examine the theoretical and linguistic underpinnings of such a view, critique the sex/gender distinction on which it is based, and endorse the maneuvers of a number of poststructuralist thinkers who have sought to problematize that very distinction. I argue in…
Psychiatric "survivors" and testimonies of self-harm
UK "Psychiatric Survivors"-a variety of activist groups comprising individuals who have been on the "receiving end" of psychiatric treatment-have, since the mid-1980s, mounted a challenge to the psychiatric system. "Survivors" have formulated their own knowledge-base concerning a range of human problems hitherto regarded as the province of "official" psychiatry only. "Official" knowledge stresses scientific classification, professional expertise,…
The Engaged Academic
This paper considers some political and ethical issues associated with the ‘academic intellectual’ who researches social movements. It identifies some of the ‘lived contradictions’ such a role encounters and analyses some approaches to addressing these contradictions. In general, it concerns the ‘politico-ethical stance’ of the academic intellectual in relation to social movements and, as such, references the ‘theory of the intellectual’ associat…
Psychopolitics
Self-Harm ‘Survivors’ and Psychiatry in England, 1988–1996
Solidarities and tensions in mental health politics
Recent years have seen a resurgence in radical mental health politics and accompanying social movements. This article identifies two tendencies. The first, the Mad Studies tendency, indicts psychiatry as a branch of medicine and asserts a politics of identity based upon the experience of ‘madness’. The second, the Psychopolitics tendency, defends the value of welfare and medicine and asserts a politics of alliance between service users and mental…
Sex/Gender
This article is a challenge to Mary Riege Laner's exhortation to 'Let sex be sex and let gender be gender' as expressed recently in the pages of Sociological Inquiry (Laner 2000, p. 471). I examine the theoretical and linguistic underpinnings of such a view, critique the sex/gender distinction on which it is based, and endorse the maneuvers of a number of poststructuralist thinkers who have sought to problematize that very distinction. I argue in…
Self-harm and moral codes in emergency departments in England
Psychiatric Survivors and Experiential Rights
Human rights may be categorised as belonging to ‘three generations’: political, social and ‘solidarity’ rights. This paper considers this schema theoretically, deploying the example of the ‘psychiatric survivor’ movement in Britain in support of its central claims. Psychiatric survivors comprise groups of psychiatric patients who have campaigned both for political and social rights in addition to a singular form of ‘right’, which is referred to h…
Szasz and His Interlocutors
It is a matter of some irony that psychiatry's most trenchant critic for over four decades is himself a psychiatrist. I refer to Thomas S. Szasz. Szasz's core thesis may be succinctly rendered: mental illness is a “myth”, a “metaphor” which serves only to obscure the social and ethical “problems in living” we face as human beings. This paper reconsiders the conceptual bases of Szasz's assault on psychiatry and assesses recent counter‐arguments of…
Psychopolitics today
We welcome Tad Tietze’s recent work building upon the political legacy of Peter Sedgwick (Tietze, this issue). Both Tietze and ourselves have been part of the recent resurgence of interest in Sedgwick, especially the relevance of his work to the politics of mental health. While our response here is quite critical, we are keen to be rowing in the same ‘Sedgwickian’ direction. Although it is gratifying that Tietze calls us ‘key inheritors’ of Sedgw…
Sex/Gender
This article is a challenge to Mary Riege Laner's exhortation to 'Let sex be sex and let gender be gender' as expressed recently in the pages of Sociological Inquiry (Laner 2000, p. 471). I examine the theoretical and linguistic underpinnings of such a view, critique the sex/gender distinction on which it is based, and endorse the maneuvers of a number of poststructuralist thinkers who have sought to problematize that very distinction. I argue in…
Self-Harm ‘Survivors’ and Psychiatry in England, 1988–1996
Psychiatric "survivors" and testimonies of self-harm
UK "Psychiatric Survivors"-a variety of activist groups comprising individuals who have been on the "receiving end" of psychiatric treatment-have, since the mid-1980s, mounted a challenge to the psychiatric system. "Survivors" have formulated their own knowledge-base concerning a range of human problems hitherto regarded as the province of "official" psychiatry only. "Official" knowledge stresses scientific classification, professional expertise,…
Szasz and His Interlocutors
It is a matter of some irony that psychiatry's most trenchant critic for over four decades is himself a psychiatrist. I refer to Thomas S. Szasz. Szasz's core thesis may be succinctly rendered: mental illness is a “myth”, a “metaphor” which serves only to obscure the social and ethical “problems in living” we face as human beings. This paper reconsiders the conceptual bases of Szasz's assault on psychiatry and assesses recent counter‐arguments of…
Psychopolitics
Psychiatric Survivors and Experiential Rights
Human rights may be categorised as belonging to ‘three generations’: political, social and ‘solidarity’ rights. This paper considers this schema theoretically, deploying the example of the ‘psychiatric survivor’ movement in Britain in support of its central claims. Psychiatric survivors comprise groups of psychiatric patients who have campaigned both for political and social rights in addition to a singular form of ‘right’, which is referred to h…
Empirical Methods in Short-term Climate Prediction - By Huug van den Dool
The Engaged Academic
This paper considers some political and ethical issues associated with the ‘academic intellectual’ who researches social movements. It identifies some of the ‘lived contradictions’ such a role encounters and analyses some approaches to addressing these contradictions. In general, it concerns the ‘politico-ethical stance’ of the academic intellectual in relation to social movements and, as such, references the ‘theory of the intellectual’ associat…
Psychopolitics today
We welcome Tad Tietze’s recent work building upon the political legacy of Peter Sedgwick (Tietze, this issue). Both Tietze and ourselves have been part of the recent resurgence of interest in Sedgwick, especially the relevance of his work to the politics of mental health. While our response here is quite critical, we are keen to be rowing in the same ‘Sedgwickian’ direction. Although it is gratifying that Tietze calls us ‘key inheritors’ of Sedgw…
Solidarities and tensions in mental health politics
Recent years have seen a resurgence in radical mental health politics and accompanying social movements. This article identifies two tendencies. The first, the Mad Studies tendency, indicts psychiatry as a branch of medicine and asserts a politics of identity based upon the experience of ‘madness’. The second, the Psychopolitics tendency, defends the value of welfare and medicine and asserts a politics of alliance between service users and mental…
Marxism and Psychiatry
Social movements, historical absence and the problematization of self-harm in the UK, 1980–2000
This article engages Bhaskar's category of absence and Foucault's notion of problematization in the context of explaining an example of the historical emergence of political activism. Specifically, it considers the emergence of the ‘psychiatric survivors’ social movement in the UK, with a focus on the ‘politics of self-harm’. The politics of self-harm refers to acts of self-injurious behaviour, such as drug over-dosage or self-laceration, which d…
Szasz, Thomas S. (1920–2012)
The Hungarian‐born, US‐based psychiatrist Thomas S. Szasz, was the author of The Myth of Mental Illness . He was a key figure in the antipsychiatry movement from the 1960s onward. He argued that the concept of mental illness was false and unscientific and that the lawful incarceration of individuals on mental health grounds was morally wrong. His views remain controversial and he has been criticized on philosophical, moral, and sociological groun…
Self-harm and moral codes in emergency departments in England
Sawyer’s Theory of Social Causation
This article critiques R. Keith Sawyer’s theory of social causation from his 2005 book Social Emergence. It considers his use of analogy with the philosophy of mind, his account of individual agency, the legacy of Emile Durkheim, the concepts of supervenience, multiple realization, and wild disjunction, and the role of history in social causation. Sawyer’s theory is also evaluated in terms of two examples of empirical research: his own micro-soci…
Disease, climate, environment and the fortunes of Buddhism during the Tibetan Empire 618–842 CE
The official adoption of Buddhism by the Tibetan state in the mid-8th Century (761-762 CE) was relatively late compared to its permeation from northern India to elsewhere in south and east Asia, due to the country’s geographical isolation. Whilst reasons for its adoption remain uncertain, it is thought that the religion provided a strong unifying influence permitting both the consolidation and subsequent expansion of the Tibetan Empire. Early his…
Sociology (14 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Psychiatry (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Mental health (8 works)