Joanna Moncrieff

Joanna Moncrieff is a psychiatrist and a founder member of the critical psychiatry network. In this conversation Roger Litten reminds her of one of her early articles written when higher education was as yet unscathed by the RAE dis-ease.

“Its function was to deal with abnormal and bizarre behaviour which without breaking the law did not comply with the advance of the new social and economic order. Its association with medicine concealed that aspect of social control by endowing it with the objectivity and neutrality of science. The medical model obscured the social process of deviance by locating problems in human biology ...” In three sentences you have condensed a remarkably powerful nucleus.

JM: I wrote that when I was an SHO, a junior doctor. I wrote it for Soundings, which was then a new Open University magazine. It makes me feel sad as I sit here now in UCL! No-one would ever encourage me to write a paper like that today. I’ve got to write papers that get into the Lancet for the Research Assessment Exercise, so it’s difficult to find time and the outlets to write things like that which need to be written, which do actually get to the fundamental core of the issue...

to read more, click the heading of this blog entry