Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health

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.

Bruce M.Z. Cohen is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Mental Health User Narratives: New Perspectives on Illness and Recovery, Being Cultural and Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

List of tables, Notes on contributors, Preface, Acknowledgements, List of abbreviations, Introduction: the importance of critical approaches to mental health and illness (Bruce M. Z. Cohen), Part I Theoretical perspectives 1. Labelling theory (Stefan Sjöström) 2. The social construction of mental illness (Kevin White) 3. 'Mental health' praxis - not the answer: a constructive antipsychiatry position (Bonnie Burstow) 4. Foucauldian theory (Simone Fullagar) 5. Marxist theory (Bruce M. Z. Cohen) 6. Critical cultural theory (Sami Timimi) 7. Critical realism and mental health research (David Pilgrim) 8. A critical feminist analysis of madness: pathologising femininity through psychiatric discourse (Jane M. Ussher) 9. Critical race theory and mental health (Roy Moodley, Falak Mujtaba and Sela Kleiman) 10. Trapped in change: using queer theory to examine the progress of psy-theories and interventions with sexuality and gender (Shaindl Diamond) 11. Reflections on critical psychiatry (Pat Bracken and Phil Thomas) 12. Mad studies (Rachel Gorman and Brenda A. LeFrançois) Part II Critical histories of psychiatry 13. Madness: a critical history of 'mental health care' in the United States (Tomi Gomory and Daniel J. Dunleavy) 14. Medieval mysticism to schizoaffective disorder: the repositioning of subjectivity in the discourse of psychiatry (Alison Torn) 15. The myth of the Irish insanity epidemic (Damien Brennan) 16. Autism looping (Gil Eyal) Part III Medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation 17. The changing drivers of medicalisation (Meredith R. Bergey) 18. Female sexual dysfunction: medicalising desire (Annemarie Jutel and Barbara Mintzes) 19. Biomedicine, neoliberalism and the pharmaceuticalisation of society (Emma Tseris) Part IV The politics of diagnosis 20. The DSM and the spectre of ignorance: psychiatric classification as a tool of professional power (Owen Whooley) 21. The attributes of mad science (David Cohen, Tomi Gomory and Stuart A. Kirk) 22. Racialisation of the schizophrenia diagnosis (Suman Fernando) Part V Colonial and global psychiatry 23. The mad are like savages and the savages are mad: psychopolitics and the coloniality of the psy (China Mills) 24. Therapeutic imperialism in disaster- and conflict-affected countries (Janaka Jayawickrama and Jo Rose) 25. Problematising Global Mental Health (Clement Bayetti and Sumeet Jain) Part VI Critical approaches to therapy 26. A sociology of and in psychotherapy: the seventh sin (Peter Morrall) 27. Marxist theory and psychotherapy (Ian Parker) 28. A feminist critique of trauma therapy (Emma Tseris) 29. A journey into the dangers of orthodoxy from the former director of the Freud Archives (Jeffrey M. Masson) Index