In his latest book, Documentary Film and Radical Psychiatry (Palgrave Macmillan 2024), Institute Fellow: Legacy, Dr Des O’Rawe examines how documentary film has responded to the methods and controversies associated with radical psychiatry, especially during the long 1960s.

Broad in scope and comparative in approach, the book discusses a range of documentaries in terms of how their production histories and visual styles were influenced by wider social, technological, and aesthetic factors.

Can documentary filmmaking offer genuinely critical perspectives on the politics and personalities associated with radical psychiatry, for example, or do its ethnographic and observational strategies merely reinforce fantasies of rationality, objectivity, and normality?  In exploring such questions, the book insists that the moment of radical psychiatry remains a complex but indispensable legacy of the post-war era.

Read more here.