ABSTRACT
The conclusion suggests future directions for research connected to the six themes canvassed in the book: the rise and fall of the asylum, the search for effective treatments, states’ interests in psychiatry and mental health, the attempts to universalise mental health, the controversies over diagnostic categories and related concepts on sociopolitical grounds, and the relationship between psychiatry, mental health, and capitalism. It also argues for three additional areas of inquiry: the way psychiatry and psychiatric concepts might generate a distinctive politics; the interaction between psychiatry, mental health, and marginalised communities and how this might help or hinder justice and equity; and, finally, how continued engagement with neuroscientific and biomedical concepts might be used to advance biocultural understandings of psychiatric distress
