Mental Hygiene

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"Mental Hygiene is packed with detailed descriptions of hundreds of crazed, funny, terrifying films and explains why they were made, who made them, and what happened to them."--BOOK JACKET.

One of today's best young novelists, Ray Robertson is also one of its ablest critics. Mental Hygiene is a collection of his most entertaining, insightful, controversial, and funniest reviews and essays written over the last five years. Believing that ''writers have a responsibility to help maintain the mental hygiene of their time, '' Robertson, following in the footsteps of Mordecai Richler and other novelist-critics such as Anthony Burgess, Kingsley and Martin Amis and John Updike, is at the front line of contemporary literary debate. Whether castigating the bland cabal he refers to as McCanlit, poking fun at the trendy ephemera of intellectual fashion or arguing for his own unique fictional aesthetic, Robertson pulls no punches and suffers no fools

The second edition of A Handbook for the Study of Mental Health provides a comprehensive review of the sociology of mental health. Chapters by leading scholars and researchers present an overview of historical, social and institutional frameworks. Part I examines social factors that shape psychiatric diagnosis and the measurement of mental health and illness, theories that explain the definition and treatment of mental disorders and cultural variability. Part II investigates effects of social context, considering class, gender, race and age, and the critical role played by stress, marriage, work and social support. Part III focuses on the organization, delivery and evaluation of mental health services, including the criminalization of mental illness, the challenges posed by HIV, and the importance of stigma. This is a key research reference source that will be useful to both undergraduates and graduate students studying mental health and illness from any number of disciplines.

Through an examination that uses previously unavailable archives and little-used primary literature, this book places the twentieth-century mental hygiene movement within the broad sweep of modern British psychiatry, offering its own reinterpretation of important elements of this history.