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.

The second edition of "The Disability Studies Reader" builds and improves upon the classic first edition, which has sold well over 6000 copies since 1999. As a field, disability studies burst onto the scene across the social sciences and humanities in the 1990s, and the first edition of the reader gathered the best work that had been written on the subject, including essays by famous authors such as Susan Sontag and Erving Goffman. The new edition is more global in its coverage and adds material on genetic testing, the human genome, queer studies, and issues in developing countries. The size of the audience has grown since the first edition's publication, and the second edition's new material will make it even more useful for courses on the subject. Courses on the subject have mushroomed in the past ten years, and can now be found across the social sciences, humanities, and behavioral sciences.

Activism is action on behalf of a cause, action that goes beyond what is conventional or routine and is relative to the actions by others. Health activism is a growing area of interest for many who work to improve health at both national and international levels because it offers a more direct approach to achieve lasting social and political change. This book, for the first time, provides a clear foundation to the theory, evidence-base and strategies that can be harnessed to bring about change to improve the lives and health of others. For anyone working to improve the health of groups and communities, this will be thought-provoking reading. It has particular relevance for postgraduate students and practitioners in public health and health promotion.

In 1981, Toronto activist Mel Starkman wrote: ""An important new movement is sweeping through the western world.... The 'mad,' the oppressed, the ex-inmates of society's asylums are coming together and speaking for themselves."" Mad Matters is the first Canadian book to bring together the writings of this vital movement, which has grown explosively in the years since. With contributions from scholars in numerous disciplines, as well as activists and psychiatric survivors, it presents diverse critical voices that convey the lived experiences of the psychiatrized and challenges dominant understandings of ""mental illness."" The connections between mad activism and other liberation struggles are stressed throughout, making the book a major contribution to the literature on human rights and anti-oppression.

"Neurodiversity has helped me understand myself and provided a sense of relief that I'm a whole neurodivergent person functioning as my brain intends." "It's provided me with the language to advocate for myself." "I no longer hated myself. I no longer felt broken. I found a sense of community. A sense of belonging" This affirming and thoughtful guide outlines how and why we need to fundamentally shift our thinking about neurodivergent people. We need to accept differences rather than framing them as a problem, abnormality or disorder. Welcome to the neurodiversity paradigm. At times challenging and radical, Sonny Jane Wise explores the intersections of neurodivergence with disability, gender, sexuality and race. Through interviews, narratives, and the lens of their own raw experiences, they consider how current systems and structures that impact neurodivergent people are rooted in outdated capitalist and racist frameworks, and how these need to change and adapt to be neurodiversity affirming. Sonny Jane's words are a rallying cry to challenge the pathology paradigm. They offer nine principles for facilitating change, reflected in deeply personal stories from the neurodivergent community. Powerful and persuasive, this book is a clarion call for a kinder and more neurodiversity affirming society.

In recent years there has been increased recognition of the global burden of mental disorders, which in turn has led to the expansion of preventive initiatives at the community and population levels. The application of such public health approaches to mental health raises a number of important ethical questions. The aim of this collection is to address these newly emerging issues, with special attention to the principle of prevention and the distinctive ethical challenges in mental health. The collection brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts in bioethics, mental health, public health, and global health. - Compared to other public health initiatives, those directed towards mental health are relatively new and have yet to receive sustained ethical analysis. This is the first edited volume to highlight the distinctive ethical issues surrounding public mental health. - The individual chapters contain cutting-edge, original research by an interdisciplinary collection of authors, including experts in bioethics, mental health, public health, and global health.

Jody Cohen and Anne Dalke construe "classrooms" as testing grounds, paradoxically boxed-in spaces that cannot keep their promise to enclose, categorize, or name. Exploring what is usually left out can create conditions ripe for breaking through, where real and abstract reverse and melt, the distinction between them disappearing. These are ecotones, transitional spaces that are testing grounds, places of danger and opportunity. In college classrooms, an urban high school, a public library, a playground, and a women's prison, Anne and Jody share scenes where teaching and learning take them by surprise; these are moments of uncertainty, sometimes constructed as failure. Digging into and exploding such moments reveals that they might be results of institutional pressures, socioeconomic and other diversities not acknowledged but operating and entangling individuals and ideas. Classrooms are sometimes "stolen" by the complex systems surrounding and permeating the activities that take place there; Jody and Anne explore ways to steal them back. Examining what is hidden but present in such moments can turn them into breakthroughs, powerful learning for educators and students-revealing how failure itself might not be what it seems. Moving back and forth between micro and macro in a continual interplay across individuals, groups, and institutions, and organizing their experiences and philosophies of teaching under the rubrics of Playing, Haunting, Silencing, Unbecoming, Leaking, Befriending, Slipping, and Reassembling, Anne and Jody try out alternative tales, exploring a pedagogical orientation that is ecological in the largest sense, engaging teachers and students in re-thinking learning and teaching in classrooms, and in their larger lives, as complex, enmeshed, volatile eco-systems. Jody and Anne weave through their own voices those of students and colleagues, demonstrating the complex playfulness of collaborative and transdisciplinary forms of teaching and learning. Not solving the contradictions, but abstracting from the immediate, they offer a dialogue, telling hard stories and funny ones, involving others' stories in response, demonstrating the complex playfulness of collaborative and transdisciplinary work. They make concrete suggestions about how academic and other structures might open up; they also remain porous and interactive, inviting reader-participants to join in transfiguring what spaces of teaching and learning are and can be-and-do. For nearly two decades, Anne Dalke and Jody Cohen were colleagues at Bryn Mawr College, where they co-wrote and co-taught cross-disciplinary classes on campus, and worked with a number of their students to establish a reading and writing program in a local women's jail. Now Jody teaches Language Arts at YouthBuild Philadelphia, a school for young people who have been out of school. Her students write about experiences in their homes and communities, about education and the criminal justice system, and about making change in their own lives and in the world. An education researcher and activist, Jody writes about community-based engagement with education policy and practice. Anne now volunteers with The Petey Greene Program, The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, and "Let's Circle Up," a Restorative Justice project. She works with readers and writers in Philadelphia county jails and Pennsylvania state prisons, where they search for personal, political and transformational responses to their shared questions about accountability and equity. A prison abolitionist and Quaker with a particular interest in resistant teaching practices, Anne is the author of Teaching to Learn/Learning to Teach: Meditations on the Classroom (Peter Lang, 2002) and co-editor, with Barbara Dixson, of Minding the Light: Essays in Friendly Pedagogy (Peter Lang, 2004).

The National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon explores the consequences of extreme personal differences between parents and children, describing his own experiences as a gay child of straight parents while evaluating the circumstances of people affected by physical, developmental or cultural factors that divide families. 150,000 first printing.

Mental disorders are ubiquitous, profoundly disabling and people suffering from them frequently endure the worst conditions of life. In recent decades both mental health and human rights have emerged as areas of practice, inquiry, national policy-making and shared international concern. Human-rights monitoring and reporting are core features of public administration in most countries, and human rights law has burgeoned. Mental health also enjoys a new dignity in scholarship, international discussions and programs, mass-media coverage and political debate. Today's experts insist that it impacts on every aspect of health and human well-being, and so becomes essential to achieving human rights. It is remarkable however that the struggle for human rights over the past two centuries largely bypassed the plight of those with mental disabilities. Mental health is frequently absent from routine health and social policy-making and research, and from many global health initiatives, for example, the Millenium Development Goals. Yet the impact of mental disorder is profound, not least when combined with poverty, mass trauma and social disruption, as in many poorer countries. Stigma is widespread and mental disorders frequently go unnoticed and untreated. Even in settings where mental health has attracted attention and services have undergone reform, resources are typically scarce, inequitably distributed, and inefficiently deployed. Social inclusion of those with psychosocial disabilities languishes as a distant ideal. In practice, therefore, the international community still tends to prioritise human rights while largely ignoring mental health, which remains in the shadow of physical-health programs. Yet not only do persons with mental disorders suffer deprivations of human rights but violations of human rights are now recognized as a major cause of mental disorder - a pattern that indicates how inextricably linked are the two domains. This volume offers the first attempt at a comprehensive survey of the key aspects of this interrelationship. It examines the crucial relationships and histories of mental health and human rights, and their interconnections with law, culture, ethnicity, class, economics, neuro-biology, and stigma. It investigates the responsibilities of states in securing the rights of those with mental disabilities, the predicaments of vulnerable groups, and the challenge of promoting and protecting mental health. In this wide-ranging analysis, many themes recur - for example, the enormous mental health burdens caused by war and social conflicts; the need to include mental-health interventions in humanitarian programs in a manner that does not undermine traditional healing and recovery processes of indigenous peoples; and the imperative to reduce gender-based violence and inequities. It particularly focuses on the first-person narratives of mental-health consumers, their families and carers, the collective voices that invite a major shift in vision and praxis. The book will be valuable for mental-health and helping professionals, lawyers, philosophers, human-rights workers and their organisations, the UN and other international agencies, social scientists, representatives of government, teachers, religious professionals, researchers, and policy-makers.

Resistance and social movements in mental health have been important in shaping current practice in both mental health and psychiatry. Contesting Psychiatry, focusing largely on the UK, examines the history of resistance to psychiatry between 1950 and 2000. Building on the author’s extensive research, the book provides an empirical account and exploration of the key features including: an account of the key social movements and organizations who have contested psychiatry over the last fifty years the theorization of resistance to psychiatry which might apply to other national contexts and to social movement formation and protest in other medical arenas the exploration of theories of power in psychiatry. Original and provocative in its approach, this book offers a new sociological perspective on psychiatry.