Neely Laurenzo Myers - Böcker

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Unprecedented numbers of young people are in crisis today, and our health care systems are set up to fail them. Breaking Points explores the stories of a diverse group of American young adults experiencing psychiatric hospitalization for psychotic symptoms for the first time and documents how patients and their families make decisions about treatment after their release. Approximately half of young people refuse mental-health care after their initial hospitalization even though we know that better outcomes depend on early support for youth and families. In attempting to determine why this is the case, Neely Laurenzo Myers identifies what matters most to young people in crisis, passionately arguing that health care providers must attend not only to the medical and material dimensions of care but also to a patient's moral agency.

In 2003 the Bush Administration's New Freedom Commission asked mental health service providers to begin promoting ""recovery"" rather than churning out long-term, ""chronic"" mental health service users. Recovery's Edge sends us to urban America to view the inner workings of a mental health clinic run, in part, by people who are themselves ""in recovery"" from mental illness.In this provocative narrative, Neely Myers sweeps us up in her own journey through three years of ethnographic research at this unusual site, providing a nuanced account of different approaches to mental health care. Recovery's Edge critically examines the high bar we set for people in recovery through intimate stories of people struggling to find meaningful work, satisfying relationships, and independent living.This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.