Dan Degerman – författare

We live in a society that valorises speech and treats silence as a harm to be broken. In mental health discourse, this assumption runs especially deep. Silence is medicalised as a symptom, pathologised as a cause, and targeted by campaigns urging people to open up. Silence in Mood Disorders challenges this consensus, arguing that the dominant understanding of silence in mental illness is not only conceptually impoverished but potentially damaging to the very people it claims to help.Drawing on first-person accounts of depression and bipolar disorder alongside phenomenology, social epistemology, and silence studies, this book shows that silence in mood disorders is a far more diverse and complex phenomenon than prevailing assumptions allow. To make sense of this diversity, the book develops a set of interconnected conceptual resources for thinking about silence. Central among these is an account of silence as a fragile, embodied, and epistemically significant human capacity, whose disruption may take different forms in depression and mania. These resources are then used to suggest how mental health research, clinical practice, policy, and activism might respond to silence with greater care and discernment. Silence in Mood Disorders will appeal to scholars and advanced students in philosophy of psychiatry, phenomenology, and social epistemology, and will reward anyone working in mental health research, the medical humanities, or disability studies.

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 referendum's aftermath. It demonstrates how ideas of emotion and mental disorder might be used to both empower and disempower people politically.

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 referendum's aftermath. It demonstrates how ideas of emotion and mental disorder might be used to both empower and disempower people politically.

Negative emotions, including anger, fear, and shame, have been at the heart of recent political events, such as the protests against COVID-19 restrictions. These negative emotions can be politically destructive, leading people to act rashly without due concern for democratic principles. However, they can also accurately signal wrongdoing and motivate acts to redress the situation, as displayed in the Black Lives Matter and climate change movements. This volume brings together perspectives from political science and philosophy to shed new light on the political faces of negative emotions. Engaging with real-world political events from Europe, the US, and Africa, contributors critically evaluate much-discussed emotions, such as anger and fear, but also less prominent ones, such as frustration and discomfort.