|
Showing 1 - 10 of
10 matches in All Departments
The essays in this collection focus on the dynamic relationship
between health and place. Historical and anthropological
perspectives are presented - each discipline having a long
tradition of engaging with these concepts. The resulting dialogue
should produce a new layer of methodology, enhancing both fields.
The essays in this collection focus on the dynamic relationship
between health and place. Historical and anthropological
perspectives are presented - each discipline having a long
tradition of engaging with these concepts. The resulting dialogue
should produce a new layer of methodology, enhancing both fields.
LSD's short but colorful history in North America carries with it
the distinct cachet of counterculture and government
experimentation. The truth about this mind-altering chemical
cocktail is far more complex -- and less controversial -- than
generally believed.
Psychedelic Psychiatry is the tale of medical researchers
working to understand LSD's therapeutic properties just as
escalating anxieties about drug abuse in modern society laid the
groundwork for the end of experimentation at the edge of
psychopharmacology. Historian Erika Dyck deftly recasts our
understanding of LSD to show it as an experimental substance, a
medical treatment, and a tool for exploring psychotic perspectives
-- as well as a recreational drug. She recounts the inside story of
the early days of LSD research in small-town, prairie Canada, when
Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer claimed incredible advances in
treating alcoholism, understanding schizophrenia and other
psychoses, and achieving empathy with their patients.
In relating the drug's short, strange trip, Dyck explains how
concerns about countercultural trends led to the criminalization of
LSD and other so-called psychedelic drugs -- concordantly opening
the way for an explosion in legal prescription pharmaceuticals --
and points to the recent re-emergence of sanctioned psychotropic
research among psychiatric practitioners. This challenge to the
prevailing wisdom behind drug regulation and addiction therapy
provides a historical corrective to our perception of LSD's medical
efficacy.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was the author of nearly fifty books and
numerous essays, best known for his dystopian novel Brave New
World. Humphry Osmond (1917-2004) was a British-trained
psychiatrist interested in the biological nature of mental illness
and the potential for psychedelic drugs to treat psychoses,
especially schizophrenia. In 1953, Huxley sent an appreciative note
to Osmond about an article he and a colleague had published on
their experiments with mescaline, which inspired an initial meeting
and decade-long correspondence. This critical edition provides the
complete Huxley-Osmond correspondence, chronicling an exchange
between two brilliant thinkers who explored such subjects as
psychedelics, the visionary experience, the nature of mind, human
potentialities, schizophrenia, death and dying, Indigenous rituals
and consciousness, socialism, capitalism, totalitarianism, power
and authority, and human evolution. There are references to mutual
friends, colleagues, and eminent figures of the day, as well as
details about both men's personal lives. The letters bear witness
to the development of mind-altering drugs aimed at discovering the
mechanisms of mental illness and eventually its treatment. A
detailed introduction situates the letters in their historical,
social, and literary context, explores how Huxley and Osmond first
coined the term "psychedelic," contextualizes their work in
mid-century psychiatry, and reflects on their legacy as
contributors to the science of mind-altering substances.
Psychedelic Prophets is an extraordinary record of a full
correspondence between two leading minds and a testament to
friendship, intellectualism, empathy, and tolerance. The fact that
these sentiments emerge so clearly from the letters, at a
historical moment best known for polarizing ideological conflict,
threats of nuclear war, and the rise of post-modernism, reveals
much about the personalities of the authors and the persistence of
these themes today.
The Saskatchewan Mental Hospital at Weyburn has played a
significant role in the history of psychiatric services, mental
health research, and providing care in the community. Its history
provides a window to the changing nature of mental health services
over the 20th century. Built in 1921, Saskatchewan Mental Hospital
was considered the last asylum in North America and the largest
facility of its kind in the British Commonwealth. A decade later
the Canadian Committee for Mental Hygiene cited it as one of the
worst facilities in the country, largely due to extreme
overcrowding. In the 1950s the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital again
attracted international attention for engaging in controversial
therapeutic interventions, including treatments using LSD. In the
1960s, sweeping healthcare reforms took hold in the province and
mental health institutions underwent dramatic changes as they began
transferring patients into communities. As the patient and staff
population shrunk, the once palatial building fell into disrepair,
the asylum's expansive farmland went out of cultivation, and mental
health services folded into a complicated web of social and
correctional services. Erika Dyck's Managing Madness examines an
institution that housed people we struggle to understand, help, or
even try to change.
Between the decriminalization of contraception in 1969 and the
introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, a
landmark decade in the struggle for women's rights, public
discourse about birth control and family planning was transformed.
At the same time, a transnational conversation about the
"population bomb" that threatened global famine caused by
overpopulation embraced birth control technologies for a different
set of reasons, revisiting controversial ideas about eugenics,
heredity, and degeneration. In Challenging Choices Erika Dyck and
Maureen Lux argue that reproductive politics in 1970s Canada were
shaped by competing ideologies on global population control,
poverty, personal autonomy, race, and gender. For some Canadians
the 1970s did not bring about an era of reproductive liberty but
instead reinforced traditional power dynamics and paternalistic
structures of authority. Dyck and Lux present case studies of four
groups of Canadians who were routinely excluded from progressive,
reformist discourse: Indigenous women and their communities, those
with intellectual and physical disabilities, teenage girls, and
men. In different ways, each faced new levels of government
regulation, scrutiny, or state intervention as they negotiated
their reproductive health, rights, and responsibilities in the
so-called era of sexual liberation. While acknowledging the
reproductive rights gains that were made in the 1970s, the authors
argue that the legal changes affected Canadians differently
depending on age, social position, gender, health status, and
cultural background. Illustrating the many ways to plan a modern
family, these case studies reveal how the relative merits of life
and choice were pitted against each other to create a new moral
landscape for evaluating classic questions about population
control.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Poor Things
Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, …
DVD
R449
R329
Discovery Miles 3 290
|