A psychiatrist and award-winning documentarian sheds light on the mental-health-care crisis in the United States. When Dr. Kenneth Rosenberg trained as a psychiatrist in the late 1980s, the state mental hospitals, which had reached peak occupancy in the 1950s, were being closed at an alarming rate, with many patients having nowhere to go. There has never been a more important time for this conversation, as one in five adults--40 million Americans--experiences mental illness each year. Today, the largest mental institution in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail, and the last refuge for many of the 20,000 mentally ill people living on the streets of Los Angeles is L.A. County Hospital. There, Dr. Rosenberg begins his chronicle of what it means to be mentally ill in America today, integrating his own moving story of how the system failed his sister, Merle, who had schizophrenia. As he says, "I have come to see that my family's tragedy, my family's shame, is America's great secret." Dr. Rosenberg gives readers an inside look at the historical, political, and economic forces that have resulted in the greatest social crisis of the twenty-first century. The culmination of a seven-year inquiry, Bedlam is not only a rallying cry for change, but also a guidebook for how we move forward with care and compassion, with resources that have never before been compiled, including legal advice, practical solutions for parents and loved ones, help finding community support, and information on therapeutic options.

Originally published: London: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Bethlem Hospital is the oldest mental institution in the world, to many famously known as ' Bedlam': a chaotic madhouse that brutalised its patients. Paul Chambers explores the 800-year history of Bethlem and reveals fascinating details of its ambivalent relationship with London and its inhabitants, the life and times of the hospital's more famous patients, and the rise of a powerful reform movement to tackle the institution's notorious policies. Here the whole story of Bethlem Hospital is laid bare to a new audience, charting its well-intended beginnings to its final disgrace and reform.

A rebellious Indian proclaiming noble ancestry and entitlement, a military lieutenant foreshadowing the coming of revolution, a blasphemous Creole embroiderer in possession of a bundle of sketches brimming with pornography. All shared one thing in common. During the late eighteenth century, they were deemed to be mad and forcefully admitted to the Hospital de San Hipolito in Mexico City, the first hospital of the New World to specialize in the care and custody of the mentally disturbed. Christina Ramos reconstructs the history of this overlooked colonial hospital from its origins in 1567 to its transformation in the eighteenth century, when it began to admit a growing number of patients transferred from the Inquisition and secular criminal courts. Drawing on the poignant voices of patients, doctors, friars, and inquisitors, Ramos treats San Hipolito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of the Hispanic Enlightenment—a site where traditional Catholicism and rationalist models of madness mingled in surprising ways. She shows how the emerging ideals of order, utility, rationalism, and the public good came to reshape the institutional and medical management of madness. While the history of psychiatry's beginnings has often been told as seated in Europe, Ramos proposes an alternative history of madness's medicalization that centers colonial Mexico and places religious figures, including inquisitors, at the pioneering forefront.

I did not write my life, and therefore cannot tell you in simple terms what happened to effect such change. I have left that task to the images that have fallen from my fingers since my youth. I have let them fall, so that one day they might be picked up. My pictures describe me correctly. Jennifer Higgie In 1842 an English artist accompanied a former mayor on a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East. Within a year he had become a devotee of the Egyptian god Osiris and murdered his beloved father, believing him to be an impostor. Bedlam is a novel inspired by a year in the life of Richard Dadd, a great Victorian painter and inmate of London's Bethlem Hospital - more commonly known as Bedlam. Higgie's prose is fragmentary yet lucid, and the novel evokes the inextricable beauty and terror of Dadd's sensory journey, while raising some of the philosophical questions it poses about art, language and other minds. Bedlam is a mystery story in which we search for clues as to how an individual might go from precocious talent to parricide. Oliver Harris, Times Literary Supplement Jennifer Higgie is co-Editor and staff writer of frieze magazine. She is the editor of Art and Humour published by the Whitechapel Gallery, London and MIT Press. She also wrote the screenplay for the feature film I Really Hate My Job, which will be on general release in 2007.

The 12th explosive novel in the internationally bestselling Skulduggery Pleasant series, BEDLAM will blow your mind – and change everything...

The author is a social worker who writes with experience, authority, and compassion about what really happened when thousands of mental patients were discharged from state hospitals--and what to do about it. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Eric Banyon, a Renaissance Faire musician, must help Korendil, a young elven noble, prevent an evil elven lord from conquering California.

Follow a young therapist as he fights to work with troubles teens in a modern psychiatric hospital. In his war against mental illness he faces battles with abuse, lies, violence and incest. This is a huminizing, intimate and entertaining coming of age journey of a shrink through the moral and administrative morass of a mental hospital.

WELCOME TO BEDLAM!Take a trip back to the Iron Age of comics and visit Bedlam City. It's the smaller, dirtier and more dangerous town next door to your superhero campaign's shining metropolis, presented here in lavish detail. Stalk its alleys, punch out its supervillains, expose its horrible secrets--and have no fear, there are always plenty more where they came from.Weighing in at a whopping 394 pages, this book is crammed with dozens of NPCs, neighborhoods, adventure seeds and locations, with enough back-stories and plot arcs to keep your PCs playing for years.Fully compatible with the Super Powers Companion Bedlam City is fast, fun and ferocious, with no new rules to learn or systems to memorize. If you own a copy of the Super Powers Companion you can pick up Bedlam City and start playing it right now.So what are you waiting for? Bedlam is calling. There's a shadowy rooftop out there just waiting for you to start lurking on it...