This book provides a much-needed account of informal community-based approaches to working with mental distress. It starts from the premise that contemporary mainstream psychiatry and psychology struggle to capture how distress results from complex embodied arrays of social experiences that are embedded within specific historical, cultural, political and economic settings. The authors challenge mainstream understandings of mental health that position a naive public in need of mental health literacy. Instead it is clear that a considerable amount of invaluable mental distress work is undertaken in spaces in our communities that are not understood as mental health treatments. This book represents one of the first attempts to position these kinds of spaces at the center of how we understand and address problems of mental distress and suffering. The chapters draw on case studies from the UK and abroad to point toward an exciting new paradigm based on informal community and socially oriented approaches to mental health. Written in an unusually accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to social science students, academics, practitioners and policy makers interested in community and social approaches to mental health.

An understanding of personal debt requires an understanding of the complex social systems that produce poverty. By drawing upon international perspectives, this book investigates why more and more people are in debt, why it is causing so much mental distress and exactly who is benefiting from what has become the world's number one growth industry.

Providing unique global perspectives on community psychology, this is exciting and important reading for students and researchers alike, written by leading experts in the field. Drawing on a wealth of experience and examples, it offers an essential guide to the political global context of this fast-developing area of psychology.

This handbook highlights a range of ground breaking, radical and liberatory clinical and critical community psychology projects from around the world. The disciplines of critical community psychology and clinical psychology are currently experiencing radical innovations that in this book are characterised as moving from the individualising practice realm toward an altogether more contextualising orientation. Both fields are responding to an array of political, social and economic injustices and a global political context. Community and clinical psychologists have found themselves reorienting their practice to confront, resist and subvert the structures that are so damaging to the lives of the vulnerable people they work with. This text posits that these approaches refute and resist the psychologising that has strengthened oppressive structures. Such practices are starting to engage in the political character of power-knowledge relationships that demand a more 'action-oriented' and less 'clinical' psychology praxis and there is a growing interest in, and commitment to, social justice in the field of mental wellbeing. Using examples of scholar, activist and practitioner work from around the world, this collection explores and documents those practices where the traditional remits of community and clinical psychology have been subverted, altered, stretched, changed and reworked in order to reframe practice around human rights, creativity, political activism, social change, space and place, systemic violence, community transformation, resource allocation and radical practices of disruption and direct action.

This is an important academic text on the political aspects of depression, specifically the relationship between globalization and depression. The text Walker reestablishes the link between mental health research and treatment, along with the political and economical influences outside the world of academic and clinical mental health. Overall, this book accomplishes the task of how closely and inextricably linked these diverse fields are and the way they operate together to produce not only a cultural representation of mental illness but influence the extent and type of mental distress in the 21st century.

This book provides a much-needed account of informal community-based approaches to working with mental distress. It starts from the premise that contemporary mainstream psychiatry and psychology struggle to capture how distress results from complex embodied arrays of social experiences that are embedded within specific historical, cultural, political and economic settings. The authors challenge mainstream understandings of mental health that position a naive public in need of mental health literacy. Instead it is clear that a considerable amount of invaluable mental distress work is undertaken in spaces in our communities that are not understood as mental health treatments. This book represents one of the first attempts to position these kinds of spaces at the center of how we understand and address problems of mental distress and suffering. The chapters draw on case studies from the UK and abroad to point toward an exciting new paradigm based on informal community and socially oriented approaches to mental health. Written in an unusually accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to social science students, academics, practitioners and policy makers interested in community and social approaches to mental health.

Depression and Globalisation is an important academic text on the political aspects of depression, specifically the relationship between globalisation and depression. In this text Dr. Walker reestablishes the link between mental health research and treatment, along with the political and economical influences outside the world of academic and clinical mental health. Overall, this book will accomplish the task of how closely and inextricably linked these diverse fields are and the way they operate together to produce not only a cultural representation of mental illness but influence the extent and type of mental distress in the 21st century.

Psychodermatology covers all aspects of how the mind and body interact in relation to the onset and progression of various skin disorders. This book is the first text written by a multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, psychologists, child specialists and dermatologists for all the health professionals who treat patients with skin problems. They cover a broad range of issues affecting these patients, including: stigma, coping, relationships, psychological treatments, the impact on children, comorbidities, psychoneuroimmunology, quality of life and psychological treatments.

A collection of poems and short stories about various subjects that were of interest to me. I had the contents of the book in my head for several years. And when I had prostate cancer I was very depressed and writing was a form of relief. I had a grandson who was going in the navy and two small granddaughters who were fussing all the time. My plan was to write to the older granddaughter and tell her to be nice. Then halfway through my letter I thought Why would a granddaughter of three years old listen to her grandpa who was seventy years old? And I was not in her home at that time to tell her to be nice to her little sister. So my first story was the fuzzy brown bear. There were six of us boys and two girls in my family and my mom called me little rascal. I used these facts in my story. Then I wrote other stories and some poems. I did not study writing but the words in this book are from my heart. The contents of the book were floating in my head for a long time."

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.