Politics of Mental Health and Illness – serie

This book presents a critical examination of the development of user involvement within research, and investigates the issues currently preventing a productive integration of Mad knowledges within research and practice.

This book presents a critical examination of the development of user involvement within research, and investigates the issues currently preventing a productive integration of Mad knowledges within research and practice. Drawing on social, linguistic and critical theories, it proposes the conditions needed to address the development of Mad epistemologies.The author’s unique approach deliberately highlights her own positionality and draws on decades of experience as a service recipient, survivor, activist and researcher to illustrate the structural and symbolic barriers faced. Employing concepts including epistemic injustice, individualization, normalization and structural violence, it suggests a radically new way of articulating ‘what’s the matter with us?’ In doing so, the book itself goes some way towards enacting the radical challenge to academic and epistemic hierarchies which, it is argued, will be required to further advance mad knowledges and user-led research.Crucially, it demonstrates how this approach can be both methodologically and conceptually rigorous. This novel work holds important insights for students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences; particularly those working in the areas of critical psychology, disability studies, Mad studies, feminist studies, critical race theory, and Queer theory.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of women's experiences within mental health services, demonstrating the need for a radical paradigm shift in how women's distress and experiences are understood. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on coercive mental health treatment, including interviews, participatory action research, arts-based research, and public sociology, the book centres the knowledge, skills, and creativity of psychiatrised women.Informed by intersectional feminism and critical mental health theory, the book explores the interlocking oppressions of psychiatric harm and patriarchal power, alongside women's survivorship and resistances. Areas covered include the pathologisation of women's emotions within mental health services, violence and deprivations in involuntary treatment, the surveillance of mothering, and social exclusions arising from psychiatric diagnoses. The book highlights the ability of collective and creative research processes to move beyond the task of documenting psychiatric harm, towards imagining rich alternatives to biomedical, therapeutic, and carceral practices in mental health. It offers a critique of the notions of ‘benevolence’ and ‘expertise’, which are commonly used to justify psychiatric coercion. It will appeal to students and scholars working across the fields of critical mental health, sociology, social work, psychiatry, mental health nursing and gender studies.Emma Tseris is senior lecturer in Social Work and Policy Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, researching feminist and critical mental health theory. She is the author of Trauma, Women's Mental Health and Social Justice: Pitfalls and Possibilities (2019) and co-author of Using Social Research for Social Justice (2023).Scarlett Franks is a survivor researcher from the University of Sydney, Australia, who also serves on the Survivor College of the National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse, the board of directors of the Grace Tame Foundation, and the Advisory Panel of the NSW Office of the Anti-Slavery Commissioner. Eva Bright Hart is a feminist survivor researcher from the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a senior social worker and public health professional from a rural area. Eva is also known as a mother, teacher, gardener, cook, author, activist and artist. As a survivor of psychiatric and gendered violence Eva uses a protective pseudonym so she can contribute without the fear of further discrimination, disablement and involuntary psychiatric treatment for herself and her family. Eva means "living one".

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of women's experiences within mental health services, demonstrating the need for a radical paradigm shift in how women's distress and experiences are understood. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on coercive mental health treatment, including interviews, participatory action research, arts-based research, and public sociology, the book centres the knowledge, skills, and creativity of psychiatrised women.Informed by intersectional feminism and critical mental health theory, the book explores the interlocking oppressions of psychiatric harm and patriarchal power, alongside women's survivorship and resistances. Areas covered include the pathologisation of women's emotions within mental health services, violence and deprivations in involuntary treatment, the surveillance of mothering, and social exclusions arising from psychiatric diagnoses. The book highlights the ability of collective and creative research processes to move beyond the task of documenting psychiatric harm, towards imagining rich alternatives to biomedical, therapeutic, and carceral practices in mental health. It offers a critique of the notions of ‘benevolence’ and ‘expertise’, which are commonly used to justify psychiatric coercion. It will appeal to students and scholars working across the fields of critical mental health, sociology, social work, psychiatry, mental health nursing and gender studies.Emma Tseris is senior lecturer in Social Work and Policy Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, researching feminist and critical mental health theory. She is the author of Trauma, Women's Mental Health and Social Justice: Pitfalls and Possibilities (2019) and co-author of Using Social Research for Social Justice (2023).Scarlett Franks is a survivor researcher from the University of Sydney, Australia, who also serves on the Survivor College of the National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse, the board of directors of the Grace Tame Foundation, and the Advisory Panel of the NSW Office of the Anti-Slavery Commissioner. Eva Bright Hart is a feminist survivor researcher from the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a senior social worker and public health professional from a rural area. Eva is also known as a mother, teacher, gardener, cook, author, activist and artist. As a survivor of psychiatric and gendered violence Eva uses a protective pseudonym so she can contribute without the fear of further discrimination, disablement and involuntary psychiatric treatment for herself and her family. Eva means "living one".

This ground breaking book draws on original research to critically examine the construction of eating disorders and disordered eating, in an analysis that encompasses psychiatry, cultural representations, and the politics of eating disorders.

This book critically examines how the globalisation of mental health through the dominant medical model has created barriers to understanding and responding to distress with reference to cases from Malawi and Sri Lanka. Its authors argue that mental health must be understood within the overall health of an individual, and individual health is located within the social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental context in which they live. Their analyses demonstrate that supplanting locally developed responses to distress with a Western medicalised model of mental health inhibits a meaningful engagement with individuals and communities in need of care. Further, they argue that this ‘supplanting’ is analogous with a colonial endeavour, and one which diverts attention from the real problems of development. Across contexts the book highlights the difficulties that mental health professionals face in facilitating individuals’ capacities within structurally damaging socio-economic environments and increasingly commercially orientated health systems.This book will appeal in particular to students, researchers and practitioners working across the fields of mental health, medical anthropology, social work, and health and development studies.

This book critically examines how the globalisation of mental health through the dominant medical model has created barriers to understanding and responding to distress with reference to cases from Malawi and Sri Lanka. Its authors argue that mental health must be understood within the overall health of an individual, and individual health is located within the social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental context in which they live. Their analyses demonstrate that supplanting locally developed responses to distress with a Western medicalised model of mental health inhibits a meaningful engagement with individuals and communities in need of care. Further, they argue that this ‘supplanting’ is analogous with a colonial endeavour, and one which diverts attention from the real problems of development. Across contexts the book highlights the difficulties that mental health professionals face in facilitating individuals’ capacities within structurally damaging socio-economic environments and increasingly commercially orientated health systems.This book will appeal in particular to students, researchers and practitioners working across the fields of mental health, medical anthropology, social work, and health and development studies.

This interdisciplinary volume examines the social production of mental health and illness in Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand). It draws together cutting-edge critical mental health scholarship from the region, to interrogate how personal, community, institutional and mediated relations, make and remake experiences of ‘mental health.’In the wake of the widespread insertion of psy-considerations into everyday lives, here contributors demonstrate how the relations between communities, practices, professionals and institutions often replicate long-standing histories of discrimination and violence motivated by psychiatric classification, even as the psy-disciplines move into supposedly more transformational domains: digital technology, schooling, human resources, and social media, for example.The book’s chapters reflect the current diversity within academic studies of mental health and illness in Australia and Aotearoa. This includes a wide range of case studies from war trauma in the Australian military and pornography addiction, to the depathologisation of trans health and peer workers in mental health services.Critical Mental Health in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand offers unique insights particular to the region, to students and scholars of critical psychology, history, sociology, medical humanities, and education.

This open access book draws on unique ethnographic fieldwork carried out in four Quebec mental health courtrooms to examine the role courts play in the organization and implementation of psychiatric coercion. It provides a much-needed critical and empirical analysis of these judicial practices at a time when social inequalities have been deepening and the legal devices that facilitate psychiatric coercion in hospitals or in the community have been multiplying, and where the voices of psychiatrically labeled individuals are marginalized.Employing a cross-sectional and structural analysis of judicial practices across different mental health courtrooms, this research investigates the coercive and violent dimensions of a process that is considered therapeutic. The book offers a critical, intersectional analysis of judicial practices, highlights the multiple legal procedures and court orders individuals can be subjected too, and examines the development of a mental health justice market. The author argues that often the legal framework has little impact on judicial practices and demonstrates the impact of paternalistic conceptions of mental health and organizational constraints. This compelling work underscores the violence of a justice system that ignores and denigrates people’s experiential knowledge and disregards rights in favor of holding individuals accountable for their poor living conditions.It will appeal to students and scholars of mental health, medical sociology, mad studies, the sociology of law and deviance, judicial ethnography and critical psychology and psychiatry, as well as to allied health and social care professionals.