The world of mental illness is typically framed around symptoms and cures, where every client is given a label. In this challenging new book, Professor Bernard Guerin provides a fresh alternative to considering these issues, based in interdisciplinary social sciences and discourse analysis rather than medical studies or cognitive metaphors. A timely and articulate challenge to mainstream approaches, Guerin asks the reader to observe the ecological contexts for behavior rather than diagnose symptoms, to find new ways to understand and help those experiencing mental distress. This book shows the reader: how we attribute ‘mental illness’ to someone’s behavior why we call some forms of suffering ‘mental’ but not others what Western diagnoses look like when you strip away the theory and categories why psychiatry and psychology appeared for the first time at the start of modernity the relationship between capitalism and modern ideas of ‘mental illness’ why it seems that women, the poor and people of Indigenous and non-Western backgrounds have worse ‘mental health’ how we can rethink the ‘hearing of voices’ more ecologically how self-identity has evolved historically how thinking arises from our social contexts rather than from inside our heads. Offering solutions rather than theory to develop a new ‘post-internal’ psychology, How to Rethink Mental Illness will be essential reading for every mental health professional, as well as anyone who has either experienced a mental illness themselves, or helped a friend or family member who has.

Developed from the author’s long teaching career, How to Rethink Human Behavior aims to cultivate practical skills in human observation and analysis, rather than offer a catalogue of immutable ‘facts’. It synthesizes key psychological concepts with insights from other disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, economics, and history. The skills detailed in the book will help readers to observe people in their contexts and to analyze what they observe, in order to make better sense of why people do what they do, say what they say, and think what they think. These methods can also be applied to our own thoughts, talk and actions - not as something we control from ‘within’ but as events constantly being shaped by the idiosyncratic social, cultural, economic and other contexts in which our lives are immersed. Whether teaching, studying, or reading for pleasure, this book will help readers learn: How to think about people with ecological or contextual thinking How your thinking is a conversation with other people How to analyze talk and conversations as social strategies How capitalist economies change how you act, talk and think in 25 ways How living in modern society can be linked to generalized anxiety and depression How to Rethink Human Behavior is important interdisciplinary reading for students and researchers in all fields of social science, and will especially appeal to those interested in mental health. It has also been written for the general reading public who enjoy exploring new ideas and skills in understanding themselves and other people.

Contains information about severe mental illness (such as schizophrenia and manic depression), details of services they provide, information for carers, an events list and information about fundraising.

Mind Fixers tells the history of psychiatry’s quest to understand the biological basis of mental illness and asks where we need to go from here. In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds. But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry into a state of crisis that a new “biological revolution” was meant to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science, and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis in our own time. Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Government programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, industry profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the story as well. In focusing particularly on the search for the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high human stakes for the millions of people who have sought medical answers for their mental suffering. This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones. A clear-eyed, evenhanded, and yet passionate tour de force, Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future, both for those who suffer and for those whose job it is to care for them.

For most of us the words madness and psychosis conjure up fear and images of violence. Using short stories, the authors consider complex philosphical issues from a fresh perspective. The current debates about mental health policy and practice are placed into their historical and cultural contexts.

Mental health laws exist in many countries to regulate the involuntary detention and treatment of individuals with serious mental illnesses. 'Rights-based legalism' is a term used to describe mental health laws that refer to the rights of individuals with mental illnesses somewhere in their provisions. The advent of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities makes it timely to rethink the way in which the rights of individuals to autonomy and liberty are balanced against state interests in protecting individuals from harm to self or others. This collection addresses some of the current issues and problems arising from rights-based mental health laws. The chapters have been grouped in five parts as follows: - Historical Foundations - The International Human Rights Framework and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - Gaps Between Law and Practice - Review Processes and the Role of Tribunals - Access to Mental Health Services Many of the chapters in this collection emphasise the importance of moving away from the limitations of a negative rights approach to mental health laws towards more positive rights of social participation. While the law may not always be the best way through which to alleviate social and personal predicaments, legislation is paramount for the functioning of the mental health system. The aim of this collection is to encourage the enactment of legal provisions governing treatment, detention and care that are workable and conform to international human rights documents.