Dear Hmadness readers,
We are pleased to share a call for papers for a workshop entitled Capitalism and Mental Health, which will take place in London on 15–16 January 2026.
Please find below the description of the theme and all practical information.

“CFA: Capitalism and Mental Health Workshop (London, 15-16 January 2026)

Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health

Organisers: Evan Sedgwick-Jell, Janina Klement, Eoin Fullam

One cannot be ‘mentally well’ in a world on fire. As our current moment of capitalism expresses grotesque extremes of this economic system’s tendencies to war, murder, exploitation, extraction and abandonment, scholars and activists addressing the psychic, the mental, systems of healthcare, psychiatric violence, and novel forms of treatment and intervention, wish to intervene. We note that ‘mental health’ is on everybody’s lips: from public health authorities and policy wonks to anticapitalist radicals and far-right demagogues, as well as those subjected to its logics of incarceration, violence, labelling and labour. Yet the term is deeply compromised by a liberal assumption of individual mental wellbeing and wellness. Abstracted from social conditions, it speaks to an ethos of self-optimisation and happiness, highfalutin rhetorics of ‘maintenance’, ‘prevention’ and ‘adaptation’, mere performative public health policies, and a ubiquitous framework for self-understanding.

We wish to clarify our thinking as to how ‘mental health’ exists in relation to the dominance of capital, the violence experienced by those in distress, and its function as an imaginary for radicals seeking to overcome this state of affairs. Rather than seeing the mental health complex as monolithic, in terms of it simply being a system of social control and pharmaceutical profit maximisation, we are interested in immanent critiques which articulate the transformative potential residing within ‘mental health’ but also eschew reformist tweaks of moribund structures and clinical logics. On the premise of this analytical lens, we would like to discuss both what a socialist organisation of mental healthcare would look like and what capitalist logics we would be required to resist in order to transform existing mental health paradigms and provision.

We propose this at a moment in which new work is emerging (Vierkant, Adler-Bolton 2022; Chapman 2023; Frazer-Carroll 2023; Proctor 2024) that posits mental distress and systems of mental healthcare in relation to movements seeking to overcome capitalism. Building on traditions referred to by Cresswell and Spandler (2016) as Mad Studies and Psychopolitics:

This workshop aims to set ‘mental health’ in its vicissitudes in relation to the study of capitalism.

In doing so, the workshop aims to consider both the radical nature of self-organised struggles of the disabled, Mad, neurodivergent, and psychiatrically labelled and confined, as well as a socialist vision of a society committed to properly providing for its members. It aims to link up those working on this topic, who are currently spread across disparate disciplines and fields, to discuss, exchange, and sharpen our thinking, with a view to creating a permanent forum for work in this vein. The geographical scope is open and while the primary focus would be on the 19th to 21st centuries, we also welcome contributions that look at other periods.

Paper proposal can refer to the following thematic streams, but are not limited to them:

• Social and economic determinants of mental health
• Historical investigations of mental health and the “psy” sciences
• Psychoanalysis and Marxism
• How theory informs practice and vice versa, translations of knowledge between academic and the real world
• The relationship between care and violence
• Philosophical investigations of ‘community’
• The politics of (community) mental health care
• Health as capitalism’s vulnerability
• Investigations of ‘contemporary disorders’, e.g. epistemology of diagnostic categories
• Speculative futures of care and madness

We welcome contributions from scholars across the humanities and social, economic and psychological sciences, and activists within the disability justice, service user, psychiatric survivor, Mad and neurodivergent movements. We encourage submissions from people with disabilities and will make every effort to accommodate accessibility requirements.

The workshop will be held in person at Birkbeck, University of London on 15-16 January 2026. Papers, presentations, interventions should be 15-20 minutes in length. Please submit a brief abstract (500 words maximum) and a short CV to capitalismmentalhealth@gmail.com by 30 September 2025. We will respond in October”.