Of Unsound Mind

why the site is gone

Of Unsound Mind is no longer a free-standing website.

I’ll explain why below, but first, here is an reintroduction to the project and what that site was from the former About page:

“To be ‘of unsound mind’ (non compos mentis) is, in legal terms, to be considered incompetent to stand trial and therefore situated somewhere between the penal approach of criminal law and the therapeutic directives of psychiatry and social work. It was the intersection of crime and madness that this project first sought to illuminate. 

More than that, the extent to which these two approaches (penal/policing approach vs. therapeutic/psychiatric approach) can actually be considered or thought about separately from one another appears questionable. This project was created to explore psychiatric power's historical entanglement with the police power.

More recently, I have turned my attention to the history of psychiatry in relation to capitalism, radical psychiatry, various forms of social psychiatry, and towards a broader historical inquiry into how and why psychiatric thought and practice develops or transforms as it does.”

I’ll try to keep all the background and biographical details brief. They’re extremely boring, but people are confused often enough (and are liable to be even more confused now that the name survives and the site is dead) that it might be worth recounting. Originally, I conceived of the website as a growing resource site and reference page for people working in critical mental health fields. It was an independent research project undertaken just because it was the sort of thing I wish I’d had available as an independent researcher of psychiatry when I started writing about it. Sometimes, I also use the name for hosting local events in Minneapolis and as a social media handle. I like it, and I think it’s funny to have a project name begin with a preposition, plus it’s nice to not paste one’s own name all over everything.

This past weekend, I received a BDS flier at a rally and noticed the logo of the website development company I’d been using, Wix. I’d signed on with them years ago and didn’t see anything about their history at the time. Nothing particularly noteworthy comes up when you just search “Wix”, but if you add in keywords like “IDF” or “Palestine,” it’s clear where the company stands, given that they’re firing staff who express support for Palestine, provide volunteer, development, and coordination of web services to support the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza, and they were founded by an ex-IDF cybersecurity guy. I wish I’d known earlier, but it appears that they weren’t especially interested in publicizing their position until after October 7th.

That’s why I took it down, but, rather than find a new place to host it, I decided to just post the blog posts here. Over the last year, it had grown into a fancy blog, since the only part I ever updated anymore was the blog. I was paying out of pocket more or less for a handful of resource pages and never asked for any donations or subscriptions. I wasn’t even sure how often they were actually being used or by whom. I’ll post blog posts slowly, since the audience has grown since I started, beginning with the texts on Fanon and the relationship between colonialism, race, violence, and mental health, since these are the most relevant texts I have for the present moment. And, of course, I’ll continue posting new material as well. If you signed up to receive new posts on my site, I exported the email list for this substack. Subscribe below if you want these posts delivered to your email. At first, I’ll mostly be posting my backlog, but I generally take a long time with writing, so I hope it won’t be too burdensome.

If you did use the timelines or resources on that site, don’t worry! A collective website for critical research in the political economy of psychiatry will be launching in the new year, which will include what I think were the best of those web resources, an ongoing journal, and more. That will be announced very soon.