Antipsychotic medications are sometimes imposed on psychiatric patients deemed dangerous to themselves and others. This is based on the assumption that treatment is safe and effective, and that recovery depends on biological adjustment. Under new laws, patients can be required to remain on these medications after leaving hospitals. However, survivors attest that forced treatment used as a restraint can feel like torture, while the consequences of withdrawal can also be severe.A bra...

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...

Manic behavior holds an undeniable fascination in American culture today. It fuels the plots of best-selling novels and the imagery of MTV videos, is acknowledged as the driving force for successful entrepreneurs like Ted Turner, and is celebrated as the source of the creativity of artists like Vincent Van Gogh and movie stars like Robin Williams. Bipolar Expeditions seeks to understand mania's appeal and how it weighs on the lives of Americans diagnosed with manic depression....

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...

Explore an ecological strength-based framework for the treatment of gender-variant clientsThis comprehensive book provides you with a clinical and theoretical overview of the issues facing transgendered/transsexual people and their families. Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and Their Families views assessment and treatment through a nonpathologizing lens that honors human diversity and acknowledges the role of oppression in the de...

If ever there was an area requiring that the research-practice gap be bridged, surely it occurs where thanatologists engage with people dealing with human mortality and loss. The field of thanatology—the study of death and dying—is a complex, multidisciplinary area that encompases the range of human experiences, emotions, expectations, and realities. The Handbook of Thanatology is the most authoritative volume in the field, providing a single source of up-to-date scholarship, rese...

The mental health community is now more divided than it has ever been before with considerable opposition to the biomedical model of illness. This report explores that polarization as the author reviews the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of the recovery movement as well as the anti-psychiatry influences behind the split. As it stands now, people experiencing severe mental illness no longer have the right to be well.

This book provides a sociological analysis of major areas of mental health and illness.

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This is a manifesto for an entirely new approach to psychiatric care; one that truly offers care rather than coercion, therapy rather than medication, and a return to the common sense appreciation that distress is usually an understandable reaction to life's challenges.

This collection of essays articulates theoretical and philosophical arguments, and advances practical applications, as to why animals ought to matter to social work, in and of themselves. It serves as a persuasive corrective to the current invisibility of animals in contemporary social work practice and thought.