The book features a radical perspective on psychiatry and the “mental health system” informed by an antipsychiatry perspective and anti-oppression analysis. In the Introduction, antipsychiatry is defined as active and radical resistance to psychiatry - antipsychiatry is not an intellectual or “academic exercise.” The book deconstructs psychiatry as a social control system.. As social control, psychiatry is specifically deconstructed as inherently coercive and based on force, fear and fraud...

'The so-called war on drugs has been a colossal failure, and this book offers further proof that we must treat drug use as a public health issue, not as a crime' Sir Richard BransonThis landmark book, from Matt Noffs and his team at the Noffs Foundation, is a much-needed voice of reason in the national conversation around the drug ice. What is ice? What does it do to the brain? What can we learn from previous drug policies about managing the current crisis? And what are the practic...

Having a good death is our final human right, argues Sandra Martin in this updated and expanded version of her bestselling and award-winning social history of the right to die movement in Canada and around the world.Winner of the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, finalist for both the Donner Prize in Public Policy and the Dafoe Prize for History, A Good Death has a new chapter on Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Law. The law allows mentally competent adults, who are s...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERMore people than ever before see themselves as addicted to, or recovering from, addiction, whether it be alcohol or drugs, prescription meds, sex, gambling, porn, or the internet. But despite the unprecedented attention, our understanding of addiction is trapped in unfounded 20th century ideas, addiction as a crime or as brain disease, and in equally outdated treatment.Challenging both the idea of the addict's "broken brain" and t...

This provocative account of our obsession with neuroscience brilliantly illuminates what contemporary neuroscience and brain imaging can and cannot tell us about ourselves, providing a much-needed reminder about the many factors that make us who we are.What can't neuroscience tell us about ourselves? Since fMRI -- functional magnetic resonance imaging -- was introduced in the early 1990s, brain scans have been used to help politicians understand and manipulate vote...

The best way to understand male sexual abuse is to learn about its survivors. They are the victims, and they have stories to tell.Author OBrien Dennis recounts how he was sexually abused as a boy in Jamaica, and he also shares accounts from other men who were abused. By giving them a voice, he unveils how male sexual abuse can so easily happen at the hands of close and trusted family, friends and even strangers.As you read these intimate stories, youll learn how societys na...

Kitty Dukakis has battled debilitating depression for more than twenty years. Coupled with drug and alcohol addictions that both hid and fueled her suffering, Kitty's despair was overwhelming. She tried every medication and treatment available; none worked for long. It wasn't until she tried electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, that she could reclaim her life. Kitty's dramatic first-person account of how ECT keeps her illness at bay is half the story of Shock. The other half, by award winnin...

Anxious Americans have increasingly pursued peace of mind through pills and prescriptions. In 2006, the National Institute of Mental Health estimated that 40 million adult Americans suffer from an anxiety disorder in any given year: more than double the number thought to have such a disorder in 2001. Anti-anxiety drugs are a billion-dollar business. Yet as recently as 1955, when the first tranquilizer -- Miltown -- went on the market, pharmaceutical executives worried that there wouldn't't...

"Vital for all working in the mental health field . . . . Fascinating reading for anyone." —ChoiceE. Fuller Torrey, the author of the definitive guides to schizophrenia and manic depression, chronicles a disastrous swing in the balance of civil rights that has resulted in numerous violent episodes and left a vulnerable population of mentally ill people homeless and victimized. Interweaving in-depth accounts of landmark cases in California, Wisconsin, and N...

American doctors dispense approximately 230 million antidepressant prescriptions every year, more than any other class of medication. Charles Barberexplores this disturbing phenomenon, examining the ways in which pharmaceutical companies first create the need for a drug and then rush to fill it. Most importantly, he convincingly argues that, without an industry to promote them, non-pharmaceutical approaches are tragically overlooked in favor of an instant cure for all emotional difficultie...

In her provocative new book, New York Times-bestselling author Judith Warner explores the storm of debate over whether we are overdiagnosing and overmedicating our children who have "issues."In Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, Judith Warner explained what's gone wrong with the culture of parenting, and her conclusions sparked a national debate on how women and society view motherhood. Her new book, We've Got Issues: Children ...

Politicians and the media tell us that people who take drugs, including alcohol or nicotine, cannot help themselves. They are supposedly victims of the disease of 'addiciton', and they need 'treatment'. The same goes for sex addicts, shopping addicts, food addicts, gambling addicts, or even addicts to abusive relationships.This theory, which grew out of the Temperance movement and was developed and disseminated by the religious cult known as Alcoholics Anonymous, has not been confi...