Society, madness, and control

What role does psychiatry play in contemporary strategies of control? How do psychiatrists and their institutions operate within all those ways of thinking and acting that aim to eliminate, minimize, or manage conduct that authorities consider undesirable? Since the middle of the nineteenth century, two great assemblages for the control of pathological conduct have taken shape in Western societies—the criminal justice system and the psychiatric system. This chapter will explore how these assemblages interact and how those who some now term forensic psychiatrists have claimed, or been given, the task of managing a multiplicity of points of tension, friction, and conflict within this dual logic of control. In doing so, the chapter considers the rise of risk thinking in psychiatry and some social, political, and ethical consequences.