ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the significant influence that French philosopher Michel Foucault has had on understanding how 'madness' or 'mental disorder' has been problematised and made thinkable as an historical category within particular regimes of truth that are configured through power-knowledge relations. He argued that the 'age of reason' created the economic, political and social conditions that justified a clearer spatial division of people associated with 'unreason' and immorality. The neurochemically deficient subject has become a recognisable identity for a range of mental illnesses and is obliged to engage in expert treatment as an exercise of responsibility and self-control that will restore and maximise life potential. Foucault's work has also usefully informed debates about the discursive shift within mental health policy, research and services towards a 'recovery' orientation. Recovery can be understood through technologies of the self that are deployed to transform the individual's ethical conduct in relation to the discursive and material conditions of everyday life.
