Employing the considerable archaeological and historical skills in her armory, Susan Piddock tries to lift the lid on the lunatic asylums of years gone by. Films and television programs have portrayed them as places of horror where the patients are restrained and left to listen to the cries of their fellow inmates in despair. But what was the world of nineteenth century lunatic asylums really like? Are these images true, or are we laboring under a misunderstanding?

Mental health problems, and the way we understand them, are a perennial source of fascination, but there is a surprising gap in the literature when it comes to mental health service clients' own understandings of mental ill health. At a time when service users' perspectives are increasingly recognised in healthcare, this seminal book highlights the importance of clients' perceptions of all aspects of mental illness. It examines the implications of these understandings, especially in relation to clients' relationships with services.

This extensive overview charts the fluctuating course of mental health policy in the United States from colonial times to today. Mental Health in America: A Reference Handbook examines the evolution of mental health policy in America from the almshouses of colonial times and the dawn of psychoanalysis in the early 1900s to the community mental health revolution in the 1960s and the insurance problems plaguing the field today. Addressing such conditions as Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, anxiety, dementia, bipolar disorder, and depression, this work explores the changing definitions and explanations of mental illness and provides detailed analyses of treatments and their effects, including electroshock therapy, lobotomy, and psychotropic drugs. Readers will meet such key players as Horace Mann, who called for the insane to be made wards of the state, and assemblywoman Helen Thomson, an involuntary-treatment advocate referred to by her opponents as "Nurse Ratchett." A summary of court cases demonstrates the impact of legislation on mental health policy in the United States A detailed chronology of key events, reform movements, legislation, such as the National Mental Health Act of 1946, and landmark research findings

Being the world's most populated country, the People's Republic of China shoulders the largest number of persons with mental illness in the world. According to related documents, there are around 16 millions of persons with mental illness that necessitate prolonged treatment and rehabilitation, 30 million children and adolescents with behavioural and emotional problems, 6 millions with persons with epilepsy and numerous elderly persons with mental problems. Facing these insurmountable needs of mental health services, despite the drastic economic development in these decades, there are various challenges for policy makers and caring professionals in providing adequate and qualitative services for persons with mental problems in China. To name a few, these challenges include insufficient mental health facilities; a great diversity in social, cultural and political contexts among different regions in China; poor mental health literacy, and highly inadequate financial support to mental health services. All these challenges occurs both in fast growing urban cities where mental problems increase drastically within a highly competitive and stressful city life as well as in deprived rural areas where mental illnesses are neglected and ignored because of unsolvable poverty problems. This book tackles these problems head on.

Crazy in America shows how people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, and other serious psychological illnesses are regularly incarcerated because alternative care is not available. Once behind bars, they are frequently punished again for behavior that is psychotic, not criminal. A compelling and important examination of a shocking human rights abuse in our midst, Crazy in America is an indictment of a society that incarcerates its weakest and most vulnerable citizens -- causing them to emerge sicker and more damaged.

Schizophrenia arguably is the most troubling, puzzling, and complex mental illness. No single discipline is equipped to understand it. Though schizophrenia has been investigated predominately from psychological, psychiatric and neurobiological perspectives, few attempts have been made to apply the tool kit of philosophy to schizophrenia, the mix of global analysis, conceptual insight, and argumentative clarity that is indicative of a philosophical perspective. This book is a major effort at redressing that imbalance. Recent developments in the area of philosophy known as the philosophy of psychiatry have made it clear that it is time for philosophy to contribute to our understanding of schizophrenia. The range of contributions is many and varied. Some contributors are professional philosophers; some not. Some contributions focus on matters of method and history. Others argue for dramatic reforms in our understanding of schizophrenia or its symptoms. The authors in this book are committed to the idea that philosophy can indeed help to understand schizophrenia in a way which is different from but complements traditional medical-clinical approaches. The book should appeal to every reader who wants to better understand a major mental illness, including its distinctive character, conscious content, and sources of puzzlement. Readers will find the essays gathered here afford stimulating insights into the human mind and its conditions of vulnerability.

An expert summary of our current understanding of bipolar disorder, this reference examines existing theories, treatment regimens, and clinically relevant applications by world authorities in psychiatric research. Divided into four main sections, this guide delves into the diagnosis and epidemiology of bipolar disorder and progresses to discussions of patient care, emerging management approaches, and the underlying biology of the disease.

Social, economic, and theoretical changes in the current clinical landscape are adding up to profound changes in childrena (TM)s services--not the least of which is an expanded need for mental health services. Professionals--novices and veteran clinicians alike--wonder how to fill this demand in the present climate of turf wars, reorganizations, and budget cuts. The Handbook of Mental Health Services for Children, Adolescents, and Families cogently analyzes the issues and provides the answers, from current issues and emerging therapeutic trends to new avenues of treatment. Thoroughly researches and documented buy industry experts, it presents the widest range of mental health services available to youth and their families.

Areas of coverage include:

Specific modalities in service delivery, including in-patient and day treatment facilities, pediatric hospitals, and community mental health centers as well as rural, school, and primary care settings.

Services tailored to special populations, such as adolescent sex offenders, homeless children and their families, children with chronic illness, oppositional teens, abuse situations, and children exposed to traumatic events.

Details on preventative programs for child abuse, substance abuse, STDa (TM)s, and gang violence.

An in-depth examination of the latest developments in childrena (TM)s services, including therapeutic camping and Internet-based treatment.

Approaches and methods for evaluating service organization, delivery, and efficacy.

Few areas of mental health care demonstrate the need for complementary services as much as child and family practice does. With this need firmly inmind, the Handbook encourages creativity and collaboration within practice settings and across agencies. For clinicians, administrators, school practitioners, and advanced-level students, this is a reference certain to have lasting impact on the field.

Examine the psychosocial factors that affect lesbian and bisexual women's mental health This essential guide presents up-to-date, evidence-based information that can be implemented to improve mental health services for lesbian and bisexual women in a variety of settings. It examines the systemic factors that play a role in their psychological and emotional well-being, and presents new research on protective factors that play an important role when lesbian/bisexual women face depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders. Lesbian and Bisexual Women's Mental Health reviews the past literature on mental health and sexual orientationciting biased and inadequate assessment, diagnosis, and treatment approaches currently in use in the care of lesbian and bisexual women. This essential guide for clinicians and researchers presents new empirical research on lesbian/bisexual women's mental health. It explores specific challenges that face various lesbian and bisexual female populations, with research on: dysthymia depression and anxietyincluding a chapter on depressive distress among African-American women the way that community size and religiosity impact lesbian/bisexual women's psychosexual development the relationship between shame and a client's attachment style the mental health implications of same-sex marriage mental health in Taiwan's T-Po lesbian communitywith a focus on community members' sexual orientation, gender roles, and gender identity the interconnectedness of sexual fantasies, psychological adjustment, and close relationship functioning in lesbian/bisexual women body image and eating issues As the diversity of this population becomes progressively more evident, so does the necessity for deeper exploration of the mental health problems facing lesbians and bisexuals. Whether you are a student, an educator, or an experienced clinician, Lesbian and Bisexual Women's Mental Health is an essential resource for relevant and meaningful information that focuses much-needed attention on the mental health of lesbian and bisexual women.

While gender has so often been found to be an important determinant of prevalence and outcomes of mental illness, economists have rarely focused on gender differences as a central element of their analyses. In this volume, we direct the focus of research in the economics of mental health squarely on the topic of gender. Each paper in this volume provides insight into the ways in which women and men are afflicted and affected by mental illness in the labor market. This volume will provide the reader with a richer understanding of prevalence of mental disorders, the educational, employment and earnings impacts of psychiatric disease, and prospects for treating and providing access to health care for the mentally ill.

African American women have commonly been portrayed as "pillars" of their communities -- resilient mothers, sisters, wives, and grandmothers who remain steadfast in the face of all adversities. While these portrayals imply that African American women have few psychological problems, the scientific literature and demographic data present a different picture. They reveal that African American women are at increased risk for psychological distress because of factors that disproportionately affect them, including lower incomes, greater poverty and unemployment, unmarried motherhood, racism, and poor physical health. Yet at the same time, rates of mental illness are low. This invaluable book is the first comprehensive examination of the contradictions between the strengths and vulnerabilities of this population. Using the contexts of race, gender, and social class, "In and Out of Our Right Minds" challenges the traditional notions of mental health and mental illness as they apply to African American women.

The stigma attached to mental illness is the main obstacle to better mental health care and the better quality of life of people who have the illness, of their families, of their communities and of health service staff that deal with psychiatric disorders. Stigma is pernicious and there are indications that despite advances of psychiatry and medicine it continues to grow and has more and often terrible consequences for patients and families. In 1996, the WPA began an international programme to fight the stigma and discrimination because of schizophrenia. The 'Open the Doors' programme has since been implemented in more than 20 countries and involved roughly 200 different anti-stigma interventions. This book details the results of these efforts internationally and provides recommendations and guidance for those seeking to join this international effort or start similar efforts to dispel stigma and discrimination.

This book examines the origins and early development of private mental health-care in England, showing that the current spectacle of commercially-based participation in key elements of service provision is no new phenomenon. In 1815, about seventy per cent of people institutionalised because of insanity were being kept in private 'madhouses'. The opening four chapters detail the emergence of these madhouses and demonstrate their increasing presence in London and across the country during the long eighteenth century. Subsequent chapters deal with specific aspects in greater depth - the insane patients themselves, their characteristics, and the circumstances surrounding admissions; the madhouse proprietors, their business activities, personal attributes and professional qualifications or lack of them; changing treatment practices and the principles that informed them. Finally, the book explores conditions within the madhouses, which ranged from the relatively enlightened to the seriously defective, and reveals the experiences, concerns and protests of their many critics.

This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice: from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education; from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come. Chapters 3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Social support is the everyday assistance offered by family, friends, neighbours and colleagues, as well as the foundations of support in a range of non-clinical settings, and plays a vital role in a person's mental health and wellbeing. This book examines the nature of social support and offers a practical approach to how it can be enhanced. Focusing on the relationships between service users and supporters , it examines service users' experiences of issues of identity, stigma, social exclusion and social networks. Individual chapters look in depth at how social support is enacted in close relationships, educational institutions and in the world of employment. The nature of 'community' is explored with particular reference to how service users can be supported into greater engagement with social networks. Demonstrating the importance of social perspectives on mental health, this book is essential reading for practitioners, students and educators in mental health, social and community work, community mental health nursing and occupational therapy.

Advocating for dementia for 20 years, Christine Bryden has been instrumental in ensuring that people with dementia are included in discussions about the condition and how to manage and think about it. This collection of her hard-hitting and inspiring insider presentations demands 'nothing about us, without us!' and promotes self-advocacy and self-reflection. Provocative and insightful, the pieces included in the book address issues that demand attention, and will change the way dementia is perceived, and the lives of people with dementia and their families.

In 1935, lobotomy, one of the most infamous procedures in the history of medicine, was heralded as a "miracle cure" by newspapers and magazines, as they hoped that this "soul surgery" would empty the nation's perennially blighted asylums. But the practice soon fell from favor, as the operation became characterized as a cruel practice with suspiciously authoritarian overtones. Only twenty years after the first operation, lobotomists once praised for "therapeutic courage" were condemned for their barbarity. American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History studies representations of lobotomy in a wide variety of cultural texts to offer a rhetorical and cultural history of the infamous procedure and its continued effect on American medicine. Author Jenell Johnson has uncovered previously discarded texts including science fiction, horror films, political polemics, and conspiracy theories that illustrate lobotomy's entanglement with social and political narratives and how they contributed to a powerful image of the operation that persists to this day. In a provocative challenge to the history of medicine, American Lobotomy argues that lobotomy's rhetorical history is crucial to understanding lobotomy's medical history, offering a case study of how medicine accumulates meaning as it circulates in public culture, and it stands as an argument for the need to understand biomedicine as a culturally situated practice.

Mental health practices and programs around the world face growing criticism from policymakers, consumers, and service providers for being ineffective, overly reliant on treatment by professionals, and overly focused on symptoms. Many have called for new paradigms of mental health and new practices that can better support recovery, community integration, and adaptive functioning for persons diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities. While there has recently been much discourse about transformation and recovery, there has yet to be a critical and systematic review that unpacks the concept of mental health systems transformation or that examines strategies for how to create transformative change in mental health.
Community Psychology and Community Mental Health provides empirical justification and a conceptual foundation for transformative change in mental health, based on community psychology values and principles of ecology, collaboration, empowerment, and social justice. Chapters provide strategies for making changes at the level of society, policy, organizations, community settings, and mental health practices. The editors and authors draw from experience in different countries in recognition of the need to tailor change strategies to different contexts. The common experiences of the international perspectives represented underscore the importance and the need for a new paradigm while demonstrating that there are many alternatives and opportunities for pursuing transformative change. This book will be of interest to community mental health professionals, researchers, and students, as well as policymakers, administrators, and those with lived experience of mental health issues.

The role of the approved mental health professional requires the ability to make sound and ethical decisions based on knowledge of mental health issues, psychiatry and the law. Critical thinking and analysis are integral to the role, and practitioners need to be able to balance technical knowledge with the ability to reflect on their own, and the professional, value base.
This much-needed text not only covers the core themes and issues pertaining to approved mental health practice, but also encourages readers to critically reflect on what makes best practice. The book begins by examining underpinning frameworks, including law, policy, and ethics, and goes on to assess current issues and challenges such as the experience of service users, the impact of space and place, and the need for evidence based practice.
Drawing on the voices and perspectives of practitioners in the field, this book not only covers what professionals need to know, but also debates responses for an occupation in times of uncertainty and change.

Mental health services tend to view and treat mental health problems in an individual-centric way. This book argues for an alternative route to recovery that is cognizant of our social nature, needs and difficulties. Focusing on the therapeutic value of meeting others with similar experiences, it explores how mutual support can help ease the distress of mental health problems and foster emotional and psychological wellbeing. The author provides an overview of the theory, history and processes of mutual support, including how it can be understood from a developmental perspective and its importance in normalising and validating experiences and lessening feelings of isolation. She provides in-depth summaries of various approaches that harness mutual support including group therapy and therapeutic communities. Clear guidance is given on how to access, set up and facilitate mutual support groups, along with detailed information on services and organisations that utilise mutual support in the UK and beyond. This book will provide both mental health professionals and those experiencing mental health difficulties with essential information on mutual support, and the positive impact it can have on people's lives.

Veronica Burton's first experience of depression came as a teenager. Following a ten year remission, during which she gained her general nursing qualification and completed her Special and Intensive Nursing of the Newborn course, work-related events precipitated a depressive relapse that has lasted to the present day. Since her retirement on medical grounds, she has campaigned against prejudice by nurses toward other nurses - including mental health nurses - who need psychological support of any kind. This book recounts the author's experiences of major depression, hospital admissions and treatments including medication, ECT and 'talking treatments'. It discusses the care given by medical and nursing staff and social and medical prejudices against those with psychiatric illnesses from a medical practitioner's perspective. Like stumbling on a secret room in a familiar building. In illuminating these previously inaccessible corners of her illness experience, she forces me to challenge my own taken-for-granted version of her history. Familiar territory seen from another perspective suddenly seems perturbing. As psychiatrists, too often we are drawn into seeing people through a lens of illness, as if this was their only identity.A" Veronica Burton's Psychiatrist Nick Rose in his Postscript

This new edition of Mental Health in a Multi-Ethnic Society is an authoritative, comprehensive guide on issues around race, culture and mental health service provision. It has been updated to reflect the changes in the UK over the last ten years and features entirely new chapters by over twenty authors, expanding the range of topics by including issues of particular concern for women, family therapy, and mental health of refugees and asylum seekers. Divided into four sections the book covers: issues around mental health service provision for black and minority ethnic (BME) communities including refugees and asylum seekers critical accounts of how these issues may be confronted, with examples of projects that attempt to do just that programs and innovative services that appear to meet some of the needs of BME communities a critical but constructive account of lessons to be drawn from earlier sections and discussion of the way ahead. With chapters on training, service user involvement, policy development and service provision Mental Health in a Multi-Ethnic Society will appeal to academics, professionals, trainers and managers, as well as providing up-to-date information for a general readership.

Despite the frequent characterization of Alzheimer's disease as a ""loss of self,"" this enlightening book demonstrates unequivocally that a person's unique self persists throughout the course of the disease. The important message in ""The Enduring Self"" is how much can be done in care settings to support a person's sense of identity, and thereby enrich the lives of people experiencing the many losses associated with dementia.Drawing from a diverse body of research, this book brings together the recommendations of the best thinkers and practitioners in multiple disciplines to illustrate the meaning of self and the importance of providing dementia care that recognizes and supports personhood. The author provides strategies for restructuring the physical and social environment to facilitate person-centered care.""The Enduring Self"" provides a foundation for culture change efforts in community-based and residential care settings, showing administrators and care staff how to reframe communication and interactions to build more meaningful relationships with people with Alzheimer's. To facilitate staff training, a detailed case study is provided, and each chapter includes discussion topics.It is suitable for administrators and care staff in community-based and residential care settings.

Schizophrenia and Psychotic Spectrum Disorders aims to engage young caregivers in psychiatry, psychology, nursing and social work so that they will be able to become well informed about this significant-and at times confusing-illness. Because schizophrenia is considered to be one of the most complicated and severe psychiatric disorders, this book has the goal of summarizing key issues of the illness, such as its presentation, frequency and age of onset, and diagnostic characteristics. It also contains informative chapters about the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, ranging from brain development issues, genetics, and likely abnormalities in neurotransmitters. This book will give young professionals and those joining the field an excellent and accessible background to treatment. In this area, Schizophrenia and Psychotic Spectrum Disorders provides a comprehensive approach to diagnosis, treatment initiation, strategies for non-response, approaches of therapy, and importantly, ways to provide family therapy and support.

This reader consists of diverse writings about Gould Farm, considered the nation's oldest residential rehabilitation community. The Farm now assists those with persistent mental illness. Informed by a Christianity that was neither sectarian nor doctrinaire, yet steeped in the Sermon on the Mount, Will Gould and his wife, Agnes, founded the Farm in 1913. In addition to serving those who arrive at Gould Farm as "guests," the Farm has assisted refugees during World War II, hosted civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s, and sponsored three Vietnamese brothers who fled their country in the 1970s. More recently, the Farm hosted a family navigating the loss of a loved one in Iraq. One Hundred Years of Service Through Community includes essays, letters, and book excerpts about Gould Farm written over the last 100 years including pieces by theologian James Luther Adams, author Rosemary Antin, sociologist Henrik F. Infield, Haverford College's Douglas V. Steere, and Appalachian Trail founder Benton MacKaye. The book also includes a story of a brief encounter in 1961 between a Gould Farm executive director, a guest, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.