This chapter examines another political organisation whose members’ experiences, opinions and actions appear to have been vulnerable to medicalisation: the UK Independence Party (UKIP). UKIP differs significantly from the other groups explored in this book, that is, the Occupy movement, Remainers and the user/survivor movement. Unlike those, UKIP is a political party, and, in the period from 2005 to the Brexit referendum in 2016 that I focus on in this chapter, it was a notable one. Despite its belligerent rhetoric and controversial aims, it participates in the traditional fray of politics – formal political systems of local, national and international government. As such, UKIP relies on a stricter and more centralised organisational structure than, for example, Occupy. The party can also lay claim to the kind of concrete achievements that eluded Occupy. In the 2014 European Parliamentary elections, UKIP won the most seats of any UK party. And, its raison d’être, a British exit from the EU has come to pass, arguably, in no small part because of UKIP's efforts.

What makes the rise of UKIP a relevant case to study in the present context, notwithstanding these differences, is that the party and its supporters seem likely targets of medicalising attacks. The animating emotion of the party's rhetoric, policies and supporters was arguably fear. Fear is not just one of the most vilified emotions in contemporary political theory (Degerman et al. 2020; Enroth 2017). It has also undergone considerable medicalisation in recent decades (Horwitz and Wakefield 2012), with the prevalence of fear-related mental disorders more than doubling since 1985 (Bandelow and Michaelis 2015). Furthermore, UKIP's opponents have long claimed that its policies are xenophobic and regressive, views which have been targets of medicalising attacks in the past. Notably, Theodor Adorno and his co-authors asserted in The Authoritarian Personality that xenophobia and ‘resistance to [progressive] social change’ were pathological (Adorno et al. 1950: 157), and despite criticism of its medicalising project (Lasch 1991: 453), the book's thesis continues to be influential (e.g., Altemeyer 1988; Jost et al. 2003). Perhaps relatedly, sociologists have claimed that we are seeing an ongoing medicalisation of racism (Gilman and Thomas 2016). Given this, UKIP, its supporters and their fear were seemingly ripe for medicalisation.