Starting in 1911, and for many years, the Alberta Hospital Ponoka, or AHP, was the largest and highest-population psychiatric institution in the Western Canadian Province of Alberta. It was also located on the outskirts of Jack Martin’s hometown, and his father was employed there, which means that its story and Martin’s intersect in varied and interesting ways. In Hometown Asylum, Martin explores the Hospital’s history, along with some of his own. In this journey, Martin considers past and contemporary issues in mental health services and treatments from the perspectives of those receiving them, those attempting to provide them, and the citizens whose attitudes and tax dollars inevitably guide and contribute to these efforts. In telling the history of the Alberta Hospital Ponoka, this book describes a wide and varied range of treatments for those suffering mental disorders, and examines how societies, past and present, have responded to the challenges of caring for them. As a part of this, Martin raises questions about the nature of mental illness, the efficacy and ethics of treatments offered, the rights of the mentally ill, and the obligations and manner of their care.

This volume addresses the similarities and differences in the role played by law and religion in various societies across the Eastern Mediterranean. Approaching these subjects in an all-encompassing manner, it also looks at the notion of law and religion in this region as a whole, in both the geographical as well as the historical space.

No matter how mediocre or mundane, all hometowns have a storied past; neither mine nor yours is an exception. Be forewarned that you will encounter organized crime, religious strife, environmental disaster, romantic heartbreak, cultural chaos, and communal calamity, so, just deal with it! Historically accurate rather than politically correct, these harrowing accounts might raise a few hackles, foster a gaggle of goose bumps, and rekindle awkward moments. This saga begins in an old main street mansion serving as a childhood home. It then progresses to the parochial cultivation of church and school. Next are the peer-pressure pathways through the surrounding neighborhoods. And last, this journey meanders beyond the outskirts where anything can happen. Maybe we have something in common. There's a possibility that eccentric elders, spooky neighbors, and mysterious others existed where you grew up. Perhaps reclusive cemeteries, moonshiners, and brothels remained discreet while overindulged citizens, oversized cops, and over-zealous teachers got plenty of attention. And for sure, at least one local residence served as a sideshow salvage yard. Although you may have outgrown your hometown, its cockamamie collection of memories continues to reside in your mind and soul. These recollections will now be triggered by venturing into A Town Untangled.

This book delves into the impacts of preconceived opinions and beliefs of asylum seekers and refugees on their life in the Netherlands, and how their attitudes towards integration influence their life in the new host country. It examines the motivations, attitudes and integration of refugees, primarily of Middle Eastern origins, in the Netherlands. The findings it provides the reader with are outcomes of an in-depth ethnographic research. Supported by portraits of several asylum seekers and refugees, this book dives deep into a poorly investigated area of research. The topic covered by this book emerges at a moment when issues of immigration and integration became growing and undeniable challenges for Western European countries, and The Netherlands is no exception. The content of this book might be of interest to fellow citizens, scholars, academics and policy-makers alike.

The violence and economic devastation of the 1980–1992 civil war in El Salvador drove as many as one million Salvadorans to enter the United States, frequently without authorization. In Nations of Emigrants, the legal anthropologist Susan Bibler Coutin analyzes the case of emigration from El Salvador to the United States to consider how current forms of migration challenge conventional understandings of borders, citizenship, and migration itself. Interviews with policymakers and activists in El Salvador and the United States are juxtaposed with Salvadoran emigrants' accounts of their journeys to the United States, their lives in this country, and, in some cases, their removal to El Salvador. These interviews and accounts illustrate the dilemmas that migration creates for nation-states as well as the difficulties for individuals who must live simultaneously within and outside the legal systems of two countries. During the 1980s, U.S. officials generally regarded these migrants as economic immigrants who deserved to be deported, rather than as political refugees who merited asylum. By the 1990s, these Salvadorans were made eligible for legal permanent residency, at least in part due to the lives that they had created in the United States. Remarkably, this redefinition occurred during a period when more restrictive immigration policies were being adopted by the U.S. government. At the same time, Salvadorans in the United States, who send relatives more than $3 billion in remittances annually, have become a focus of policymaking in El Salvador and are considered key to its future.

The chapters of this book form a persuasive chorus of social practices that advocate the use of music to build a capacity for resilience in individuals and groups. As a whole they exemplify music projects that share common features aligned with an ecological view of reform in health, education and social work systems. Internationally renowned and early career academics have collaborated with practitioners to sing ‘Songs of Resilience’; some of which are narratives that report on the effects of music practices for a general population, and some are based on a specific approach, genre or service. Others are quite literally ‘songs’ that demonstrate aspects of resilience in action. The book makes the connection between music and resilience explicit by posing the following questions—Do music projects in education, health and social services build a measurable capacity for resilience amongst individuals? Can we replicate these projects’ outcomes to develop a capacity for resilience in diverse cultural groups? Does shared use of the term ‘resilience’ help to secure funding for innovative musical activities that provide tangible health, education and social outcomes?

A moving chronicle of who belongs in America. Like so many American factory towns, Lewiston, Maine, thrived until its mill jobs disappeared and the young began leaving. But then the story unexpectedly veered: over the course of fifteen years, the city became home to thousands of African immigrants and, along the way, turned into one of the most Muslim towns in the US. Now about 6,000 of Lewiston's 36,000 inhabitants are refugees and asylum seekers, many of them Somali. Cynthia Anderson tells the story of this fractious yet resilient city near where she grew up, offering the unfolding drama of a community's reinvention--and humanizing some of the defining political issues in America today. In Lewiston, progress is real but precarious. Anderson takes the reader deep into the lives of both immigrants and lifelong Mainers: a single Muslim mom, an anti-Islamist activist, a Congolese asylum seeker, a Somali community leader. Their lives unfold in these pages as anti-immigrant sentiment rises across the US and national realities collide with those in Lewiston. Home Now gives a poignant account of America's evolving relationship with religion and race, and makes a sensitive yet powerful case for embracing change.

In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

When four women are found brutally murdered and shockingly posed on park benches throughout the city over several months, Martine's boss fears a PR disaster for the still busy tourist season, and Martine is now also tasked with acting as liaison between the mayor and the police department. Martine is paired with a young detective, Julian Fletcher, and together they dig deep into the city's and the country's past, only to uncover a dark secret dating back to the 1950s, when orphanages in Montreal and elsewhere were converted to asylums in order to gain more funding. The children were subjected to horrific experiments such as lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and psychotropic medication, and many of them died in the process. The survivors were supposedly compensated for their trauma by the government and the cases seem to have been settled. So who is bearing a grudge now, and why did these four women have to die? Print run 20,000.

When the wind of the 1960s blew through the world of psychiatry In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded, redolent of Basaglia’s own wartime experience inside a fascist gaol. Patients were frequently restrained for long periods, and therapy was largely a matter of electric and insulin shocks. The corridors stank, and for many of the interned the doors were locked for life. This was a concentration camp, not a hospital. Basaglia, the new Director, was expected to practise all the skills of oppression in which he had been schooled, but he would have none of this. The place had to be closed down by opening it up from the inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the patients, the nurses and the psychiatrists working in that “total institution.” Inspired by the writings of authors such as Primo Levi, R.D. Laing, Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon, and the practices of experimental therapeutic communities in the UK, Basaglia’s seminal work as a psychiatrist and campaigner in Gorizia, Parma and Trieste fed into and substantially contributed to the national and international movement of 1968. In 1978 a law was passed (the “Basaglia law”) which sanctioned the closure of the entire Italian asylum system. The first comprehensive study of this revolutionary approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums is a gripping account of one of the most influential movements in twentieth-century psychiatry, which helped to transform the way we see mental illness. Basaglia’s work saved countless people from a miserable existence, and his legacy persists, as an object lesson in the struggle against the brutality and ignorance that the establishment peddles to the public as common sense.