Philosophers, historians and sociologists have long warned of the adverse political effects of medicalisation. Some political theorists have raised similar concerns. Yet their criticism has often been sweeping and seldom attended to political agency, much less to political agency and emotion together. In studies that do consider the impact of medicalisation on political agency, we find little, if any, evidence that psychiatric concepts have actually been deployed against political actors. I have sought to provide a better understanding of how the medicalisation of negative emotions impacts political agency. Drawing upon an Arendtian framework for understanding the relationship, I have analysed four instances of political action in which people's emotional and mental fitness for public life has been called into question.

These cases have shown how political actors can draw upon empowering factors to transform their emotional experiences into public issues and take concerted action, but also how their political opponents can disempower them by undermining the fragile public shape of their emotions through medicalising attacks and other means. Four features of negative emotions make them vital to political agency. They can motivate us to reflect on the causes of our experiences, drive us to address them, communicate our authentic concern with a particular issue, and help constitute and sustain social cohesion between us and other people. To this, the Arendtian perspective developed here contributed a central insight: emotions are not inherently political. Recalling Arendt's (1998: 50) own words, before emotions have been ‘transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized’ they ‘lead an uncertain shadowy kind of existence’. To fuel political agency, negative emotions must be transformed into something political, that is, articulated as public issues. In some of the cases, the process of transforming emotions into public issues was implicit. But actors in all cases clearly struggled in different ways with the problem of maintaining the public shape of their emotions. A related Arendtian insight, which I developed with the help of feminist theorists like Sue Campbell, is that the public shape of emotions is fragile. Even after an individual has articulated her negative emotion as a public issue, she and others may easily begin to doubt the connection between the two. Throughout the book, I have tried to show how empowering factors can facilitate and maintain such articulations, whereas disempowering factors prevent and undermine them.