Nima Bassiri, "Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

19 snips

Mar 12, 2025

Nima Bassiri, an Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University and co-director of the Institute for Critical Theory, dives into the provocative relationship between mental illness and economic productivity. He discusses how historically, psychiatry intertwined with capitalist values, measuring mental health against economic utility. The conversation explores concepts like pathological value, the 'mad genius' and how perceptions of madness have shaped societal norms, revealing the complexities of mental health in a capitalist context.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Psychiatry as Social Theory

Psychiatry emerged as a social theory, not just a medical field.
It aimed to understand social norms and deviations, using economic behavior as a key indicator.

INSIGHT

The Hermeneutic Dilemma

19th-century psychiatry faced a "hermeneutic dilemma" in diagnosing borderland mental states.
Economic benchmarks, like financial gain or loss, offered a seemingly objective measure for these ambiguous cases.

INSIGHT

Economic Metrics and Social Judgment

Economic metrics offered a simple arithmetic for evaluating mental states: is wealth increasing or decreasing?
This logic permeates social judgments, influencing how we perceive normalcy and virtuosity.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity.

Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state.

Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered.

Nima Bassiri is assistant professor of literature at Duke University, where he is also the codirector of the Institute for Critical Theory.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory