ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|102 pages
chapter 8|7 pages
A critical feminist analysis of madness
chapter 10|9 pages
Trapped in change
part II|36 pages
Critical histories of psychiatry
chapter 14|7 pages
Medieval mysticism to schizoaffective disorder
part III|26 pages
Medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation
part IV|26 pages
The politics of diagnosis
chapter 20|7 pages
The DSM and the spectre of ignorance
part V|30 pages
Colonial and global psychiatry
chapter 23|8 pages
The mad are like savages and the savages are mad
part VI|29 pages
Critical approaches to therapy