Governing risky individuals: The role of psychiatry in new regimes of control

Risk thinking has become central to the practice of contemporary psychiatry. In forensic psychiatry there has been a widespread shift away from notions of dangerousness towards the assessment and management of risk. In psychiatric practice more generally the assessment prediction, management of risk has become central to the new logics of ‘community psychiatry’. New statistical techniques for making risk quantifiable and calculable are being devised, in particular in North America. On the. one hand, risk thinking seeks to bring the future to the present and make it manageable. On the other, ideas of the unmanageable and incorrigible riskiness of certain monstrous individuals transfixes much public debate on psychiatry in a ‘post‐carceral’ era, and leads to new demands for preventative detention. Risk thinking thus transforms the role of mental hearth professionals, the nature of their work, and their place in regimes of control. Psychiatric prefessionals now collaborate with a range of other mental health and control experts in the government of risk, both seeking strategies that will minimise the aggregate levels of risk and seeking to identity and manage particular risky individuals. This paper seeks to identify the new logics of power and control which are embodied in this risk culture, and the social, political and ethical implications of problematizing and governing mental ill health in terms of risk.