Mental Health At The Crossroads

This book is a challenge to the enduring status and domination of bio-medical approaches in mental health services. Contributors from four continents argue that this domination, along with modernization and multidisciplinary work, will not improve people's lives unless social and psychological perspectives are appreciated and integrated. This implies new forms of relationships and social arrangements. Mental Health at the Crossroads: the Promise of the Psychosocial Approach is a timely analysis of the psychosocial approach as it resonates across the discipline divide, considering the past and future development. It is written from the perspectives of service users and carers, managers, practitioners, educators, researchers and policy makers, illustrated with case studies from Australia, Brazil, Italy, UK and the USA. This book presents an alternative approach to conventional thinking in mental health, providing a fascinating and valuable resource for those seeking new perspectives, grounded in theory with practice examples, in order to influence the current agenda and change practice.

The word 'mental' often brings many stray feelings whenever it enters the thought process. The word has often been associated with mental illness and the mental hospitals, or a serious mental illness like schizophrenia. On the contrary, the World Health Organization (WHO), when it came into being, very clearly defined health as not just absence of illness, but a state of physical, mental and social well-being. Mental health is one aspect of health which we often neglect. We, though, may also ignore physical health and indulge in unhealthy habits, mental health gets much lower priority. The recent Covid-19 pandemic has brought a focus on mental health with the recognition of the stress and mental health issues faced by most of the population including those who were infected, their family members and health care professionals, effects of lockdown, quarantine and social distancing. This book is an attempt to familiarize the general population, the community, family members of those with mental illness, social scientists and the health professionals about the basic principles of mental health. It covers mental health issues across different populations, introduces to early signs of mental illness, rights of persons with mental illness and many other issues. About the Editors: Rakesh K Chadda is Professor and Head, Department of Psychiatry & Chief, National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. Pratap Sharan is Professor, Department of Psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. Mamta Sood is Professor, Department of Psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. Koushik Sinha Deb is Additional Professor, Department of Psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction -- Does psychiatry have a future? -- Is behavior therapy a fad or new direction in psychiatry? -- Does psychotherapy change the outcome in schizophrenia? -- Is marihuana hazardous to your health? -- Do emotional problems of the child always have the origin in the family? -- Should psychiatric patients ever be hospitalized involuntarily? -- Should homosexuals adopt children? -- When (if ever) should sex-change operations be performed? -- Should psychiatric patients be given genetic counseling? -- Community mental health: slogan or new directions? -- Should the psychiatrist have a role in criminal justice systems? -- Should psychiatrists be medically trained?

Reviewing epidemiological and demographic trends internationally, this book provides an overview of major health trends, summarises the current state of the world's health, and reviews recent estimates of the global burden of disease.

The field of academic psychiatry is in crisis, everywhere. It is not merely a health crisis of resource scarcity or distribution, competing claims and practice models, or level of development from one country to another, but a deeper, more fundamental crisis about the very definition and the theoretical basis of psychiatry. The kinds of questions that represent this crisis include whether psychiatry is a social science (like psychology or anthropology), whether it is better understood as part of the humanities (like philosophy, history, and literature), or if the future of psychiatry is best assured as a branch of medicine (based on genetics and neuroscience)? In fact, the question often debated since the beginning of modern psychiatry concerns the biomedical model so that part of psychiatry’s perpetual self-questioning is to what extent it is or is not a branch of medicine. This unique and bold volume offers a representative and critical survey of the history of modern psychiatry with deeply informed transdisciplinary readings of the literature and practices of the field by two professors of psychiatry who are active in practice and engaged in research and have dual training in scientific psychiatry and philosophy. In alternating chapters presenting contrasting arguments for the future of psychiatry, the two authors conclude with a dialogue between them to flesh out the theoretical, research, and practical implications of psychiatry’s current crisis, outlining areas of divergence, consensus, and fruitful collaborations to revision psychiatry today. The volume is scrupulously documented but written in accessible language with capsule summaries of key areas of theory, research, and practice for the student and practitioner alike in the social and human sciences and in medicine, psychiatry, and the neurosciences.

This book demonstrates synergies and distils hard-earned lessons of human and forest rights struggles to inform the ongoing debates on environmental human rights. It highlights the ongoing struggles of the communities in postcolonial India that are confronted with the most brutal and unprecedented assault on their economic and sociocultural rights – often led by the political establishment. The contributions in this edited volume present multiple narratives of these struggles, theoretical inquiries into a diversity of political imaginations, and the intertwined changes in the legal and biophysical landscapes. These contributions speak to some of the most important contemporary debates within the human rights community that stands in the crossroads with rights of Indigenous Peoples and other members of subaltern groups. This volume will be of great value to scholars, students, and researchers interested in human rights politics, power, forest governance, and environmental movements in postcolonial India. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights.

Training in psychoanalysis is a long and demanding process. However, the quality of education available is hugely variable across the world. The structure of psychoanalytic education, centered on the hierarchical "training analysis" system, reflected a concerted effort to maintain a stable and high quality educational process. However, throughout time this system has become a major source of institutional contradictions that affect the training of candidates, the scientific developments within psychoanalysis, and the nexus of psychoanalytic theory and practice with the surrounding scientific, social and cultural world. Psychoanalytic Education at the Crossroads examines the ways in which group processes, the hierarchal culture in institutes, the influence of individual personalities, the lack of research and the faults in supervision can all stifle creativity and hinder candidates’ progress. In this compelling work, Otto Kernberg sets out clear suggestions for how these issues can be addressed, and how he sees the future of psychoanalytic education across all psychoanalytic settings and schools of thought. The first part of this volume is focused primarily on the analysis of the nature of these problems and their effects on the personal analysis and supervision of candidates; on theoretical and clinical seminars; on selection, progression, and graduation; on educational principles and requirements, developments of theory and technique and, in particular, limitation versus expansion of the realm of interests and applications of psychoanalysis. The second part of this volume deals with proposals of solutions to the problems encountered, and major suggestions for innovation in psychoanalytic education. The author’s work in this area has been hugely influential. Kernberg has made a substantive difference in the development of psychoanalytic institutes and education, and continues to do so. Psychoanalytic Education at the Crossroads will be essential reading to anyone involved in psychoanalytic education, whether as a psychoanalyst, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, trainee, trainer, or supervisor.