Political Agency and the Medicalisation of Negative Emotions (Paperback)

Paperback. This book explores negative emotions like anger, fear and grief as important drivers of political action. It examines how treating these feelings as medical problems affects society. Drawing on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the book develops an original understanding of political emotions as fragile and vulnerable to attacks disputing their relevance to public life. It presents and analyses four case studies of emotional politics in the UK, ranging from assertions that UKIP supporters were emotionally primitive to diagnoses of anxiety disorder in the Brexit referendums aftermath. It demonstrates how ideas of emotion and mental disorder might be used to both empower and disempower people politically. Argues that the medicalisation of negative emotions is reshaping our ability to act politically Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.