Critiquing the Psychiatric Model is the first Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. Understanding the current systems of psychology and psychiatry is profoundly important. So is exploring alternatives. The Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series presents solicited chapters from international experts on a wide variety of underexplored subjects. This is a series for mental health researchers, teachers, and practitioners, for parents and interested lay readers, and for anyone trying to make sense of anxiety, depression, and other emotional difficulties. Critiquing the Psychiatric Model sets out to present a clear picture of the current “mental disorder paradigm,” one that claims an ability to “diagnose and treat mental disorders” and that provides “medication” as its primary treatment. Critiquing the Psychiatric Model traces the history of the psychiatric model and its “diagnostic manual” and identifies its flaws and problem areas by presenting more than twenty solicited chapters from experts worldwide.

Theoretical Alternatives to the Psychiatric Model of Mental Disorder Labeling is the fourth Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. Understanding the current systems of psychology and psychiatry is profoundly important. So is exploring alternatives. The Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series presents solicited chapters from international experts on a wide variety of underexplored subjects. This is a series for mental health researchers, teachers, and practitioners, for parents and interested lay readers, and for anyone trying to make sense of anxiety, depression, and other emotional difficulties. Theoretical Alternatives recognizes and appreciates those who have contributed to the abundance of literature critiquing the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the biomedical model of mental health, and the practice of psychiatric diagnosing. It intends to move past that discourse, and present macro and system-level alternatives to DSM and the ICD diagnosing (the World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), in the form of conceptually developed frameworks, taxonomies, and models to guide clinical work and theory.

Essays written by social work master's degree students responding to the categories of psychological diagnosis issued by the American Psychiatric Association.

This book offers a comprehensive Marxist critique of the business of mental health, demonstrating how the prerogatives of neoliberal capitalism for productive, self-governing citizens have allowed the discourse on mental illness to expand beyond the psychiatric institution into many previously untouched areas of public and private life including the home, school and the workplace. Through historical and contemporary analysis of psy-professional knowledge-claims and practices, Bruce Cohen shows how the extension of psychiatric authority can only be fully comprehended through the systematic theorising of power relations within capitalist society. From schizophrenia and hysteria to Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder, from spinning chairs and lobotomies to shock treatment and antidepressants, from the incarceration of working class women in the nineteenth century to the torture of prisoners of the ‘war on terror’ in the twenty-first, Psychiatric Hegemony is an uncompromising account of mental health ideology in neoliberal society.

Eric Maisel invites depression sufferers and their service providers to consider whether human sadness has been monetised into the disease of depression and asks readers to consider the personal implications of this 50 year cultural shift from human problem to medical ailment.

In order to work effectively with people with personality disorders it is important that Mental Health Social Workers (MHSWs) have a clear understanding of trauma and its impact on the person. It is also important that they have good relational skills and the support of the team and organisation. Drawing on an analysis of the similarities (and differences) in service user and MHSWs’ perspectives, the book outlines the further skills, knowledge and conditions that will help them to make a more effective contribution to the support of those with personality disorder. The book will appeal to qualified Mental Health Social Workers and those on Post-Qualifying Programmes because, uniquely, it explores personality disorder from a social work perspective.