Peter Sedgwick, proto-critical realist?

Abstract

Peter Sedgwick died only a year after the publication of his PsychoPolitics, so a dialogue with the author about his work is missing. However, the book was well received and joined a long list of critical texts about mental health service provision. This article argues that his perspective, which rejected a biomedical orthodoxy, but was also doubtful about the true radical potential of ‘anti-psychiatry’, reflected a direction of intellectual travel that, with hindsight, can be seen to reflect the philosophy of critical realism. A case is made in relation to this by examining Sedgwick’s concern for combining ontological realism and epistemological relativism. Some of the underdeveloped aspects of his analysis may have reflected his necessary lack of engagement with the wider debates about the crisis of the welfare state, agency and structure, and the similarities and differences between the natural and social sciences that emerged during the 1980s and 1990s.