Psychiatry and the Business of Madness

Psychiatry and the Business of Madness
Author: B. Burstow
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137503858

Based on extensive research, this book is a fundamental critique of psychiatry that examines the foundations of psychiatry, refutes its basic tenets, and traces the workings of the industry through medical research and in-depth interviews.

Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness

Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness
Author: Andrea Daley
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2021-11-13
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3030836924

This book challenges the perception of the psychiatric chart as a neutral and objective text. The chapters included in this book coalesce to reveal the psychiatric chart as a text that is, in fact, “storied” by institutional ideology that reflects, reinforces, reinterprets, and, at times, resists gendered, raced, sexualized, and classed norms, values, and presuppositions. Intersectional analysis highlights the nuanced ways in which dominant ideologies are activated in chart documentation to produce qualitatively specific psychiatric narratives of distress and related responses in the psychiatric institution. The book serves as a much-needed resource for mental health professionals, education and training programs, and researchers that meaningfully takes into account the social and structural materiality of people’s lives and its impact on experiences of distress. It will also appeal to scholars investigating equity in health care across the fields of Critical Psychology, Disability Studies, Social Work, Allied Health, Mad Studies and Social Justice.

State of Madness

State of Madness
Author: Rebecca Reich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2018-03-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1609092333

What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

Madness at Home

Madness at Home
Author: Akihito Suzuki
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2006-03-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520245806

Publisher description

A First-Rate Madness

A First-Rate Madness
Author: Nassir Ghaemi
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2012-06-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0143121332

The New York Times bestseller “A glistening psychological history, faceted largely by the biographies of eight famous leaders . . .” —The Boston Globe “A provocative thesis . . . Ghaemi’s book deserves high marks for original thinking.” —The Washington Post “Provocative, fascinating.” —Salon.com Historians have long puzzled over the apparent mental instability of great and terrible leaders alike: Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, and others. In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, offers a myth-shattering exploration of the powerful connections between mental illness and leadership and sets forth a controversial, compelling thesis: The very qualities that mark those with mood disorders also make for the best leaders in times of crisis. From the importance of Lincoln's "depressive realism" to the lackluster leadership of exceedingly sane men as Neville Chamberlain, A First-Rate Madness overturns many of our most cherished perceptions about greatness and the mind.

Performance, Madness and Psychiatry

Performance, Madness and Psychiatry
Author: A. Harpin
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-09-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781137337245

This exciting collection of essays explores the complex area of madness and performance. The book spans from the 18th century to the present and unearths the overlooked history of theatre and performance in, and about, psychiatric asylums and hospitals. The book will appeal to historians, social scientists, theatre scholars, and artists alike.

Psychiatry Interrogated

Psychiatry Interrogated
Author: Bonnie Burstow
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2016-11-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3319411748

This edited volume is an anthology of institutional ethnography (IE) inquiries into psychiatry—the first ever to be written. It focuses on a large variety of different geographic locations and constitutes a major contribution to anti/critical psychiatry, as well as institutional ethnography. Themes include the DSM, the use and protection of problematic psychiatric research, the penetration of psychiatry into the workplace. Adding depth and breath, the contributors, while all are schooled in IE, come from a large variety of walks of life, authors including: academics, psychiatric survivors, investigative reporters, activists, nurses, artists, and lawyers—each bringing their own unique expertise/standpoint to bear. The result is an intellectually rigorous book, contributions to several disciplines, ammunition for activism, and a compelling read that cannot be put down.

Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health

Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health
Author: Bruce M.Z. Cohen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2017-09-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315399563

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health offers the most comprehensive collection of theoretical and applied writings to date with which students, scholars, researchers and practitioners within the social and health sciences can systematically problematise the practices, priorities and knowledge base of the Western system of mental health. With the continuing contested nature of psychiatric discourse and the work of psy-professionals, this book is a timely return to theorising the business of mental health as a social, economic, political and cultural project: one which necessarily involves the consideration of wider societal and structural dynamics including labelling and deviance, ideological and social control, professional power, consumption, capital, neoliberalism and self-governance. Featuring original essays from some of the most established international scholars in the area, the Handbook discusses and provides updates on critical theories of mental health from labelling, social constructionism, antipsychiatry, Foucauldian and Marxist approaches to critical feminist, race and queer theory, critical realism, critical cultural theory and mad studies. Over six substantive sections, the collection additionally demonstrates the application of such theoretical ideas and scholarship to key topics including medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation, the DSM, global psychiatry, critical histories of mental health, and talk therapy. Bringing together the latest theoretical work and empirical case studies from the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Canada, the Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health demonstrates the continuing need to think critically about mental health and illness, and will be an essential resource for all who study or work in the field.

Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness

Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness
Author: Richard Hallam
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2018-03-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 135166476X

In Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness: Rethinking the Nature of Our Woes, Richard Hallam takes aim at the very concept of mental illness, and explores new ways of thinking about and responding to psychological distress. Though the concept of mental illness has infiltrated everyday language, academic research, and public policy-making, there is very little evidence that woes are caused by somatic dysfunction. This timely book rebuts arguments put forward to defend the illness myth and traces historical sources of the mind/body debate. The author presents a balanced overview of the past utility and current disadvantages of employing a medical illness metaphor against the backdrop of current UK clinical practice. Insightful and easy to read, Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness will appeal to all professionals and academics working in clinical psychology, as well as psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners.