To be "of unsound mind" (non compos mentis) is, in legal terms, to be considered incompetent to stand trial and therefore situated somewhere between the penal approach of criminal law and the therapeutic directives of psychiatry and social work. It was the intersection of crime and madness that this project first sought to illuminate. 

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More than that, the extent to which these two approaches (penal/policing approach vs. therapeutic/psychiatric approach) can actually be considered or thought about separately from one another appears questionable. This project was created to explore psychiatric power's historical entanglement and mutual constitutions with the police power.

 

More recently, I have turned my attention to the history of psychiatry in relation to capitalism, radical psychiatry, various forms of social psychiatry, and towards a broader historical inquiry into how and why psychiatric thought and practice develops or transforms as it does.

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Research, writing, and design by Sasha Durakov Warren.