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I've reverted your editions to the lead despite of your grammar and style could be better than mine. Nothing against you nor against your efforts (thanks!), but I found some inaccuarcies in your edition, that I will discuss here before changing the lead. ¿Ok? -- ClaudioSantos (talk) 17:34, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
The SPK's illness concept is not a concept of mental illness, if you read all its documentation you will easily find that SPK emphatically reject a distinction between so called mental' and 'physical' illnesses. They even empghatically said: illness as being one although divided by medical-means into illneses.
In the SPK you and even the police could find books from Marx, Engels, Hegel, even about guerrilla, and even from the psychiater Wilhelm Reich, but not even one book or text about anti-psyichiatry and that issue was never discussed in the SPK. The allegedely relation between SPK and 'antipsychiatry movement' has been emphatically rejected also by the SPK. SPK even attacks the anti-psyichiatry movement as a reformist medical-movement, leaded by doctors who remained being doctors and part of the iatro-capitalism.
SPK emphatically and expresively refers to Illness against iatro-capitalism. It is a basic part of their ideology and its illness concept, as they consider the fundamental identity/contradiction being precisely Illness against capitalism. Replacing the word capitalism with "diseased society" misrepresents SPK ideology. And also you will find that SPK repeatedly claims to be a pro illness collective as being the core of its revolutionary concept, so I think it should not be supressed.
You're right about the point with illness not being restricted to mental illness. That was my mistake, and should be corrected. --JN46617:41, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
I accept that the SPK does not and did not associate itself with the anti-psychiatry movement; so I agree that phrase ("A part of the anti-psychiatry movement...") should be removed. What is true is that they received some support from members of the anti-psychiatry movement, notably Foucault; I think that is okay to state. Would you agree? --JN46617:43, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
There is a reference to an "ill society" on the spk website (in a piece by Sartre, however, rather than Huber). Parker has a reference to an "insane world" here; would you say that the summary is inaccurate? I don't mind limiting it to capitalism, if that is what the SPK themselves said; but didn't the other elements Parker mentions play into it as well? --JN46617:53, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
So, fixing my blunders (thanks for pointing them out!), would this be okay as a lead?
The Socialist Patients' Collective (in German ''Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, or SPK) was a patients' collective founded in Heidelberg in February 1970, by Wolfgang Huber, a doctor at the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic; it emerged from the Patients' Front which had existed since 1965.
The SPK considered mental and physical illness to be caused by the capitalist system, and viewed it as an appropriate response to such a system; and it saw doctors as the system's ruling class. Its declared aim was, and remains, to "turn illness into a weapon", a vision that attracted support from intellectuals and anti-psychiatrists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault. Under pressure from German law enforcement over alleged terrorist links, the SPK declared its self-dissolution in July 1971, "as a strategic withdrawal"; Huber and his wife were arrested and jailed. Since then, the SPK has continued its activities as the Patients' Front, today the PF/SPK(H).
About Foucault: what I know and is documented is certainly J.P. Sartre supported and encouraged decisevely SPK, and he participated and encouraged the counter-investigations on the SPK-trials, and he even wrote a support preface to one of the SPK books, indeed a very important book containing the core of SPK concepts. I also know and it is documented that Foucault and others, signed a press declaration when some SPK patients were imprissoned, but except that, he did nothing else; but it is also documented that some years later, Foucault did nothing but remained sat when some PF patients were attacked in a medical congress were PF patients made public for the first time one of its fundamental texts (Iatrocracy on a world wide scale ). -- ClaudioSantos (talk) 18:13, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Would you agree if we do not stigmatize Sartre as beeing a "leftist intellectual"? but perhaps you would find a better anecdote to know that Sartre was so "crazy" (for whom?) that not only he did supported SPK practice and concepts, but he also did rejected a Nobel price!!! But I am not suggesting to include that label in this article. -- ClaudioSantos (talk) 18:13, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
No problem with dropping the leftist descriptor. :) Sartre is quite well known enough and has his own biography; deleted above. That there was support from Foucault, at least at one time, is mentioned here; as his is a well-known name, I think it might be worth including, even if Sartre's support was somewhat more substantial than Foucault's. --JN46618:21, 1 March 2011 (UTC)