Psychiatry 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 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.

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.

Revisioning Psychiatry brings together new perspectives on the causes and treatment of mental health problems. The contributors emphasize the importance of understanding experience and explore how the brain, the person, and the social world interact to give rise to mental health problems as well as resilience and recovery.

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping new book tells us, the history of American psychiatry is really a record of ignorance. On the Heels of Ignorance begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no antipsychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results.