Managing Madness In The Community

While mental illness and mental health care are increasingly recognized and accepted in today’s society, awareness of the most severely mentally ill—as well as those who care for them—is still dominated by stereotypes. Managing Madness in the Community dispels the myth. Readers will see how treatment options often depend on the social status, race, and gender of both clients and carers; how ideas in the field of mental health care—conflicting priorities and approaches—actually affect what happens on the ground; and how, amid the competing demands of clients and families, government agencies, bureaucrats and advocates, the fragmented American mental health system really works—or doesn’t. In the wake of movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Shutter Island, most people picture the severely or chronically mentally ill being treated in cold, remote, and forbidding facilities. But the reality is very different. Today the majority of deeply troubled mental patients get treatment in nonprofit community organizations. And it is to two such organizations in the Midwest that this study looks for answers. Drawing upon a wealth of unique evidence—fifteen months of ethnographic observations, 91 interviews with clients and workers, and a range of documents—Managing Madness in the Community lays bare the sometimes disturbing nature and effects of our overly complex and disconnected mental health system. Kerry Michael Dobransky examines the practical strategies organizations and their clients use to manage the often-conflicting demands of a host of constituencies, laws, and regulations. Bringing to light the challenges confronting patients and staff of the community-based institutions that bear the brunt of caring for the mentally ill, his book provides a useful broad framework that will help researchers and policymakers understand the key forces influencing the mental health services system today.

The Saskatchewan Mental Hospital at Weyburn has played a significant role in the history of psychiatric services, mental health research, and providing care in the community. Its history provides a window to the changing nature of mental health services over the 20th century. Built in 1921, Saskatchewan Mental Hospital was considered the last asylum in North America and the largest facility of its kind in the British Commonwealth. A decade later the Canadian Committee for Mental Hygiene cited it as one of the worst facilities in the country, largely due to extreme overcrowding. In the 1950s the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital again attracted international attention for engaging in controversial therapeutic interventions, including treatments using LSD. In the 1960s, sweeping healthcare reforms took hold in the province and mental health institutions underwent dramatic changes as they began transferring patients into communities. As the patient and staff population shrunk, the once palatial building fell into disrepair, the asylum’s expansive farmland went out of cultivation, and mental health services folded into a complicated web of social and correctional services. Erika Dyck’s "Managing Madness" examines an institution that housed people we struggle to understand, help, or even try to change.

Psychiatry regularly comes under attack as a way of caring for and controlling the mentally ill. Originally published in 1986, this title explores the history and theory of psychiatry to illuminate current practice at the time, and shows why mental health services had developed in particular ways. The book was invaluable for all those who needed to understand the problems and processes behind current psychiatric practice at the time – sociologists and psychologists, psychiatrists and doctors, social workers, and health service planners and administrators – and will still be of historical interest today.

Psychiatry regularly comes under attack as a way of caring for and controlling the mentally ill. Originally published in 1986, this title explores the history and theory of psychiatry to illuminate current practice at the time, and shows why mental health services had developed in particular ways. The book was invaluable for all those who needed to understand the problems and processes behind current psychiatric practice at the time – sociologists and psychologists, psychiatrists and doctors, social workers, and health service planners and administrators – and will still be of historical interest today.

In Colonizing Madness Jacqueline Leckie tells a forgotten story of silence, suffering, and transgressions in the colonial Pacific. It offers new insights into a history of Fiji by entering the Pacific Islands’ most enduring psychiatric institution—St Giles Psychiatric Hospital—established as Fiji’s Public Lunatic Asylum in 1884. Her nuanced study reveals a microcosm of Fiji’s indigenous, migrant, and colonial communities and examines how individuals and communities lived with the label of madness in an ethnically complex island society. Tracking longitudinal change from the 1880s to the present in the construction and treatment of mental disorder in Fiji, the book emphasizes the colonization of madness across and within the divides of culture, ethnicity, religion, gender, economics, and power. Colonization of madness in Fiji was forged by the entanglement of colonial institutions and cultures that reflected tensions and prejudices within homes, villages, workplaces, and churches. Mental despair was equally an outcome of the destruction and displacement wrought by migration and colonialism. Madness was further cast within the wider world of colonial psychiatry, Western biomedicine, and asylum building. One of the chapters explores medical discourse and diagnoses within colonial worlds and practices. The “community within” the asylum is a feature in Leckie’s study, with attention to patient agency to show how those labeled insane resisted diagnoses of their minds, confinement, and constraints—ranging from straitjackets to electric shock treatments to drug therapies. She argues that madness in colonial Fiji reflects dynamics between the asylum and the community, and that “reading” asylum archives sheds new light on race/ethnicity, gender, and power in colonial Fiji. Exploring the meaning of madness in Fiji, the author does not shy away from asking controversial questions about how Pacific cultures define normality and abnormality and also how communities respond. Carefully researched and clearly written, Colonizing Madness offers an engaging narrative, a superb example of an intersectional history with a broad appeal to understanding global developments in mental health. Her theses address the contradictions of current efforts to discard the asylum model and to make mental health a reality for all in postcolonial societies.

What are the costs and consequences of living in a society that has undergone an "organizational revolution"? To what extent is social life in the 21st century dominated by the rational control that is characteristic of bureaucratic organizations large and small? Organizations and Society addresses these broader human questions with a critical perspective, while at the same time explaining the main concepts and theories in the field. Students of all interests—those who wish to run organizations someday, study them, or simply understand their importance in the contemporary social order—will benefit from the insights and cogent arguments of this text for undergraduate classrooms.

The tenth edition of Sociology of Mental Disorder presents the major issues and research findings on the influence of race, social class, gender, and age on the incidence and prevalence of mental disorder. The text also examines the institutions that help those with mental disorders, mental health law, and public policy. Many important updates are new to this edition: -More first-person accounts of individuals who suffer from mental illness are included. -The new DSM-5 is now thoroughly covered along with the controversy surrounding it. -A new section on on social class and its components. -Updated assessment of the relationship between mental health and gender. - A revised and in-depth discussion of mental health and race. -New material on public policy, mental disorder, and the Affordable Health Care Act. -Updates of research and citations throughout.