Psychiatrist, Pharmacist, Executioner: The social life of acute behavioural disturbance
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
Excited Delirium and Acute Behavioural Disturbance are routinely deployed by state agents to rationalise violent use of force against people reportedly experiencing a mental health crisis. This lecture does not seek to dispute the material effects of mental health problems, and the serious harms experienced by those it effects, both directly and indirectly. Rather, it will use the case of Darren Cumberbatch, who died in such circumstances, to analyse the meaning and function of psychiatric discourse and practice. Specifically, this paper is an attempt to make sense of how the legitimating power of medicalisation is deployed by police and those challenging it, rationalising or contesting uses of state violence that enable the contradictory threat of criminal intent and irrational psychosis.
Lecture delivered by Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper (Senior Lecturer in Social and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London).
Adam Elliott-Cooper received his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Oxford, in 2016. He has previously worked as a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at UCL, as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and as a research associate in the Department of Geography at King's College London.
His first monograph, Black Resistance to British Policing, was published by Manchester University Press in May 2021. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021).
Adam sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence.
Carson Cole Arthur will be Adam's discussant during the lecture. He is a Lecturer of Criminology at the University of Law (London, UK). His research interests include deaths in police custody, racial violence, and accountability from a Black Critical Theory perspective. His work has been published in The British Journal of Criminology, Crime, Media, Culture, and Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. He is currently writing a monograph on the truth and fiction of accountability in the inquests of Black people who have died in London police custody.
Contact name: Tiggey May
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