Major Themes in Health and Social Welfare – serie

This collection focuses on child welfare in its specific sense: welfare and social interventions with children and young people undertaken by State bodies or NGO's. The term 'child welfare' is deployed differently in diverse international settings. In the United Kingdom child welfare tends to refer to individualised programmes for children who have experienced problems in their lives. In India, to take a contrasting example, it can also refer to major housing and nutrition programmes. This collection takes an inclusive approach to international perspectives.The collection is completed by a new general introduction by the editor, individual volume introductions, and a full index.Titles also available in this series include, Medical Sociology (November 2004, 4 Volumes, £495) and the forthcoming collection Health Care Systems (2005, 3 Volumes, c.£395).

Medical sociology was first recognizable as a distinct area of study in the 1950s and is now probably the largest specialized area of sociology. This collection comprises a comprehensive statement of the history, current concerns and relevance of medical sociology to an understanding of health and health care worldwide. The articles included are genuinely international in two important respects: they represent the best of contemporary scholarship worldwide, and they have applicability to all types of society and health care systems.A general introduction in the first volume provides a review of the development and state of medical sociology internationally as well as a rationale for the collection as a whole. Each of the four volumes also has its own introduction, and each of the four sections within each volume is preceded by a brief rationale.Titles also available in this series include, Child Welfare (November 2004, 4 Volumes, £495) and the forthcoming collection Health Care Systems (2005, 3 Volumes, c.£395).

The study of death and dying truly crosses disciplinary boundaries. Scholars in the field represent a wide spectrum of disciplines in medicine, nursing, social work, sociology, psychology, philosophy, health education and the humanities. The volumes in this collection therefore take a broad and interdisciplinary approach and cover a wide range of materials, including classic studies that have helped frame the field, significant research that has influenced the development of the field, and current cutting-edge material. Moreover, the work brings together theory, research and clinical practice.

Disability Studies is a relatively new area of academic thought, emerging in its current form in the early 1990s. It is, by its nature, broad ranging and has seen a rapid expanse in scholarly research. It is an international development or movement, with active organizations of academics in Britain, the United States, Canada, the Nordic countries, and in Australasia.This new title in the Routledge series, Major Themes in Health and Social Welfare, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject’s rapid evolution—and the accompanying explosion in research output. With a general introduction newly written by the editor, Disability is a four-volume collection which brings together cutting-edge and canonical research from the field of Disability Studies to make available in one ‘mini library’ core readings across a wide range of policy arenas, including education, housing, employment, health, social care, leisure, and recreation. It will be welcomed by students new to the field and will also be an invaluable resource for scholars and other researchers in the area.

Millions of us make use of psychoactive—or mind-altering—drugs. Such drugs, both legal and otherwise, can cause pleasure or pain (or both). So, too, can sex, gambling, shopping, dieting, exercise, and Internet use. ‘Addiction’ or ‘dependence’ on substances like alcohol, tobacco, illicit and prescribed drugs, and on other risky behaviours, is strongly associated with a broad range of personal and social consequences. They can greatly enhance life—or ruin it. The heavy and chronic use of legal and illegal drugs, as well as other compulsive or problematic behaviours, are associated with massive health and social problems. Health problems related to addiction include dependence, injury, overdose, foetal damage, cancers, liver disease, and premature mortality, while social problems include crime and disorder, debt, family violence, poverty, and industrial inefficiency.The addictions field is very wide ranging, and covers a considerable number of psychoactive substances and compulsive behaviours. However, much of the literature remains inaccessible or is highly specialized and compartmentalized, so that it is hard for many of those who are interested to obtain an informed and comprehensive overview of issues and evidence. The sheer scale of the growth in addiction research output—and the breadth of the field—makes this four-volume collection especially timely and meets the demand for a wide ranging, multidisciplinary perspective on this fascinating and important subject. The editors have collected material under the following sections and, together with their newly written introduction, this Routledge Major Work, a new title in the Major Themes in Health and Social Welfare series, will enable users to make sense of the wide range of approaches, theories, and concepts that have informed the subject to date:• concepts of addiction• alcohol• tobacco• illicit drugs• other addictive behaviours such as compulsive gambling, sex, exercise, shopping, Internet use and dieting.Edited by two of the world’s leading authorities on addiction and risky behaviours, Addiction will be welcomed by professionals and policymakers in health and social services. It will also be an invaluable reference resource for students and scholars working in the field of addiction, as well as those whose courses in a wide range of allied disciplines—such as nursing, medicine, psychology, education, social work, and law—increasingly require an understanding of the issues this collection explores.

Some groups of people are healthier than others. Overwhelmingly, for almost all kinds of morbidity and mortality, groups at the bottom of the social scale are less healthy than those at the top. But this simple observation describes a complex phenomenon that has become a major focus of research, teaching, intervention, and public policy and has led to recognition of the stark power of social determinants of population health. Why are poorer, less educated, lower-class groups less healthy than others? Historically, and indeed today, this has been a question that has polarized researchers, policy-makers, politicians, and casual onlookers. The debate is intensely contentious because if health inequalities are largely a consequence of people at the bottom of the social scale lacking resources and living in poor conditions, then, arguably, policies must be directed towards correcting those material deficits. But if inequalities in health are largely due to the social inequalities among people and their feelings about their position in relation to other people, then policies that encourage a more egalitarian society may be needed to close the health gap.Edited by two leading scholars in the field, the four volumes in this new Routledge Major Work bring together key research from a wide range of disciplines, including epidemiology and public health, sociology, psychology, biology, and public policy, to provide a coherent and multidisciplinary synthesis of this vast and vibrant literature.Volume I assembles the basic evidence of health inequalities in different countries and different time periods, and focuses on the extent to which health inequalities result from social selection versus social causation. Volume II covers the main schools of thought on the causes of health inequalities and the pathways linking low social status to poor health. The focus of the third volume is on the effectiveness of interventions that have been designed to reduce health inequalities. The theme of Volume IV is the social and political ecology of health and the biology and psychology of human sensitivity to the social environment.Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction newly written by the editors, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Health and Inequality is an essential work of reference for both scholars and practitioners hoping to understand (and mitigate or remove) inequalities in health.

Publisher’s note:The publishers would like to confirm that for Volume 1: ‘Theoretical and Methodological Developments’ and Volume 3: ‘Gender and Healthcare’ Ellen Annandale was the lead editor and lead author of the introductions. Kate Hunt was the lead editor for Volume 2: ‘Understanding the Patterning of Health by Gender’ and Volume 4: ‘Gender and Health Behaviours’The order in the printed book did not reflect this distinction, but we are happy to clarify the correct order. Life expectancy is higher for women than men in almost every country, leading the World Health Organization to suggest that ‘their innate constitution’ gives women ‘an advantage over men’. However, this differential is far greater in some countries (e.g. Japan) than others (e.g. Qatar and Botswana) and rapid changes in the sex differential in life expectancy—as seen in the countries of the former Soviet Union in the last decades of the twentieth century—can only be explained by social factors. Research on health can thus demonstrate how the ways that different societies (historically and cross-culturally) create differential life chances and opportunities for men and women gets ‘written’ on people’s bodies.Women’s mortality advantage does not translate into better health across all outcomes. For example, women are diagnosed with more depression and more joint pain and associated disability. For many years, it was assumed that the aphorism that ‘women get sicker but men die quicker’ (the so-called ‘gender paradox’) was an adequate and useful summary for gender differences in health, but recent research shows patterns are far more complex. This complexity poses exciting challenges for research on gender and health. Gender inequalities in health provide a window to understand how the social world ‘gets under the skin’ and how human health can be improved.A tradition of research stemming back to at least the 1960s has highlighted the gendered assumptions that are built into the provision of healthcare. This occurs within the community where women generally shoulder the burden of caring for others, and in formal health systems where the division of labour is often highly patriarchal. Gendered assumptions about the kinds of health problems that men and women suffer from, and about the ways that they relate to symptoms of illness, may bias decision-making by service providers, often in ways that are not beneficial to health.Issues and themes in and around gender and health such as these continue to generate a huge scholarly literature, and this new collection from Routledge’s Major Themes in Health and Social Welfare series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to help researchers and students navigate and make sense of it. The collection is made up of four volumes which bring together the best and most influential canonical and cutting-edge research. It draws together key works spanning theoretical developments and empirical research which uses a range of qualitative and quantitative methods. With a full index, and thoughtful introductions, newly written by the editors, Gender and Health traces the progress of research in this field and highlights the challenges for future research. It will be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital and enduring resource.

Suicide is increasingly recognized as a major global issue of public health, with far-reaching social, economic, and emotional consequences. The World Health Organization estimates that around 800,000 people die each year by suicide, with suicide attempts perhaps up to twenty times more frequent than the completed act. Moreover, in the past thirty years global suicide rates have increased by a dizzying 60 per cent. (For example, in Japan—after Russia, the developed world’s leading suicide nation—more than 33,000 people committed suicide in 2007.)Some general facts are now widely known. For instance: suicide is mainly a (young) male act; mental disorders (such as depression and schizophrenia) are strongly associated with the majority of suicide cases; and suicide rates tend to increase during times of economic downturn, and decrease when individuals within society are well integrated—which probably explains why suicide rates tend to decline during wars. Also, certain groups of people (e.g. alcoholics, the bereaved, prisoners, and migrants) are recognized to be at particular risk of suicide.While it is possible to make such generalizations, many urgent questions, of course, remain unanswered. Consequently, practical and scholarly research better to understand the complex interaction of psychological, genetic, sociological, and environmental factors that may lead to suicide flourishes as never before, not least in the hope of instigating effective suicide-prevention strategies and initiatives. However, much of the literature remains inaccessible or is highly specialized and compartmentalized, so that it is often difficult to obtain an informed overview. To enable users to make sense of the sheer scale of the growth in research output—and the breadth of the field—this new four-volume collection from Routledge’s Major Themes in Health and Social Welfare series answers the need for a comprehensive reference work offering wide-ranging and multidisciplinary perspectives on suicide and suicidal behaviour.Edited by two of the world’s leading authorities, the collection brings together canonical and the very best cutting-edge research. Suicide will be welcomed by professionals and policy-makers. It will also be an invaluable reference resource for students and scholars working in the field, as well as users from a wide range of allied disciplines—such as nursing, education, social work, and law—who increasingly require an understanding of the issues this collection explores.