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Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World

Author(s) : Patrick Bracken, Author(s) : Philip Thomas

Reviews and Endorsements

* Explains some of the major difficulties in mental health practice, helping the reader understand some of the background tensions in clinical work
* Uses short stories to help readers to consider complex philosophical issues from a fresh perspective, inviting them to question commonly held assumptions about the nature of psychosis and distress
* Places current debates about mental health policy and practice into their historical and cultural contexts

Throughout, the authors examine the conflicting ways in which politicians, academics, and mental health professionals appear to understand madness, and contrast this with voices and experiences that are usually excluded - those of the people who use mental health services. They then examine the power of psychiatry to shape how we understand ourselves and our emotions, before considering some of the basic limitations of psychiatry as science to make madness meaningful. In the final section of the book they draw on evidence from service users and survivors, the humanities and anthropology, to point out a new direction for mental health practice. This new direction emphasises the importance of cultural contexts in understanding madness, placing ethics before technology in responding to madness, and minimising 'therapeutic' coercion.

Readership: Psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health nurses, social workers ; philosophers, policy makers

Contents:
* Introduction: 'The times they are a-changin'
* Doing their best
* 1 Values, evidence, conflict
* 2 What counts as evidence?
* The miracle drug
* 3 The battle for acceptance: defining the relationship between medicine and the world of madness and distress
* The ring
* 4 Foregrounding contexts: what kinds of understanding are appropriate in the world of mental illness?
* Losing Peter
* 5 Mind, language and meaning
* Beetles
* 6 Ethics before technology - is 'treatment' the best way to think about mental health work?
* 7 Narrative and the ethics of representation
* 8 Meaning and recovery
* 9 Citizenship and the politics of identity
* 10 Are you local? Responding to the challenge of globalisation in mental health
* The veil

Authors, editors, and contributors:

Patrick Bracken, Clinical Director, West Cork Mental Health Service, Ireland and Philip Thomas, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Citizenship and Community Mental Health, School of Health Studies, University of Bradford, UK