Helen Spandler – författare

This book explores the challenges of applying disability theory and policy, including the social model of disability, to madness and distress. It brings together leading scholars and activists from Europe, North America, Australia and India, to explore the relationship between madness, distress and disability. Whether mental health problems should be viewed as disabilities is a pressing concern, especially since the inclusion of psychosocial disability in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This book will appeal to policy makers, practitioners, activists and academics.

This book explores the challenges of applying disability theory and policy, including the social model of disability, to madness and distress. It brings together leading scholars and activists from Europe, North America, Australia and India, to explore the relationship between madness, distress and disability. Whether mental health problems should be viewed as disabilities is a pressing concern, especially since the inclusion of psychosocial disability in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This book will appeal to policy makers, practitioners, activists and academics.

Asylum to Action offers an alternative history of a libertarian therapeutic community at Paddington Day Hospital in West London in the 1970s. Helen Spandler recaptures the radical aspirations, as well as the conflicts, of the early therapeutic community movement, radical psychiatry and the patients' movement.The author's account of the formation of the Mental Patients' Union, the first politicised psychiatric survivors group in the UK, raises questions about the connections between the service user movement, therapeutic communities, critiques of psychiatry and psychoanalytic models of intervention. In particular, Spandler challenges Claire Baron's dominant account of the subject in her influential book Asylum to Anarchy. She points out that some of the key difficulties that beset Paddington Day Hospital persist in modern therapeutic community practice and, indeed, in mental health services in general. Arguing that these dilemmas require sustained attention, Asylum to Action also informs a wider analysis of the significance of social movements, social action and critical social theory.

"Beyond Fear and Control" discusses ways in which services can change the focus from managing or 'stopping' self harm to working with young people in more permissive, 'young person centred' and empowering ways. Although the need for such a change is increasingly being recognised, the practical implications and ethical dilemmas of this shift have rarely been explored. This book addresses this gap by providing in-depth descriptions of a range of innovative practices which are effective in supporting young people who self harm. People harm themselves in many ways and for many different reasons. Whilst we recognise that there is a complex relationship between self harm and suicide, this book is about supporting young people who use self harm primarily as a way of coping with distress. In this context self harm can be viewed as - the expression of, and temporary relief from overwhelming, unbearable and often conflicting emotions, thoughts or memories, through a self injurious act which they can control and regulate. Undoubtedly young people who self harm arouse strong emotional reactions in most people including fear, helplessness, confusion and anger.Responses are often based on a need to try and protect or rescue young people from danger.However, our heightened emotional response, coupled with myths and misunderstandings about both young people and self harm, can lead us to respond in ways that, rather than being empowering and helpful, can be felt as controlling and harmful.