Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness focuses on the question of madness as it is experienced by women within gendered sociopolitical contexts. Contributors to this edited collection engage with a diverse range of topics, including black and ethnic minority women’s experiences of psychosis, psychosis in transwomen, sexual trauma and psychosis, the doctor–patient relationship, and women’s experiences of mental health treatment and recovery. Chapters span the disciplines of psychoanalysis, sociology, women’s studies, critical theory, and madness studies.

Building and expanding upon the prior edition of Essentials of Health Justice, the new second edition of this unparalleled text explores the historical, structural, and legal underpinnings of racial, ethnic, gender-based, and ableist inequities in health, and provides a framework for students to consider how and why health inequity is tied to the ways that laws are structured and enforced. Additionally, it offers analysis of potential solutions and posits how law may be used as a tool to remedy health injustice. Written for a wide, interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars in public health, medicine, and law, as well as other health professions, this accessible text discusses both the systems and policies that influence health and explores opportunities to advocate for legal and policy change by public health practitioners and policymakers, physicians, health care professionals, lawyers, and lay people.

This collection offers a diverse range of perspectives that seek to find meaning in madness. Mainstream biomedical approaches tend to interpret experiences commonly labelled "psychotic" as being indicative of a biological illness that can best be ameliorated with prescription drugs. In seeking to counter this perspective, psychosocial outlooks commonly focus on the role of trauma and environmental stress. Although an appreciation for the role of trauma has been critical in expanding the ways in which we view madness, an emphasis of this kind may nevertheless continue to perpetuate a subtle form of reductivism—madness continues to be understood as the product of a deficit. In seeking to move beyond causal-reductivism, this book explores a variety of perspectives on the question of finding inherent meaning in madness and extreme states. Contributors to this book are distinguished writers and researchers from a variety of international and interdisciplinary perspectives. Topics span the fields of depth psychology and psychoanalysis, creativity, Indigenous and postcolonial approaches, neurodiversity, mad studies, and mysticism and spirituality. This collection will be of interest to mental health professionals, students and scholars of the humanities and social sciences, and people with lived experience of madness and extreme states. Readers will come away with an appreciation of the more generative aspects of madness, and a recognition that these experiences may be important for both personal and collective healing.

Lives Interrupted: Psychiatric Narratives of Struggle and Resilience provides insight into the everyday experiences of individuals struggling with severe psychic distress during a six-month immersion program at the Fountain House headquarters, a New York-based organization that works to address the effects of serious mental illness. These narratives add complexity and objectivity to the expanding discussion of psychiatric treatment plans. Contributors to this collection argue that narratives are vital to treatment and should not be treated as secondary options to standard diagnosis and treatment practices that rely heavily on pharmaceuticals and often result in short-term revolving-door interventions for complex forms of human suffering.

Rethinking the Relation between Women and Psychoanalysis: Loss, Mourning, and the Feminine uses contemporary psychoanalytic views to resituate women as desiring subjects within the psychoanalytic narrative. Contributors to this edited collection explore the various configurations of mourning, pain, regret, and grieving in diverse societies and cultures in order to reconstruct the role of women in modern psychoanalysis. They raise questions about the status of women in culture and society and contend with themes that psychoanalysts have associated with women since the late nineteenth century, such as loss and mourning, femininity and motherhood, and desire and sexuality. This book is recommended for students and scholars of psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, literature, and philosophy.

The last few years have brought increased writings from activists, artists, scholars, and concerned clinicians that cast a critical and constructive eye on psychiatry, mental health care, and the cultural relations of mental difference. With particular focus on accounts of lived experience and readings that cover issues of epistemic and social injustice in mental health discourse, the Mad Studies Reader brings together voices that advance anti-sanist approaches to scholarship, practice, art, and activism in this realm. Beyond offering a theoretical and historical overview of mad studies, this Reader draws on the perspectives, voices, and experiences of artists, mad pride activists, humanities and social science scholars, and critical clinicians to explore the complexity of mental life and mental difference. Voices from these groups confront and challenge standard approaches to mental difference. They advance new structures of meaning and practice that are inclusive of those who have been systematically subjugated and promote anti-sanist approaches to counter inequalities, prejudices, and discrimination. Confronting modes of psychological oppression and the power of a few to interpret and define difference for so many, the Mad Studies Reader asks the critical question of how these approaches may be reconsidered, resisted, and reclaimed. This collection will be of interest to mental health clinicians; students and scholars of the arts, humanities and social sciences; and anyone who has been affected by mental difference, directly or indirectly, who is curious to explore new perspectives.

In Psychoanalysis as a Subversive Phenomenon: Social Change, Virtue Ethics, and Analytic Theory, Amber M. Trotter examines the radical sociopolitical roots of psychoanalysis and contends that psychoanalytic practices can and should be used to promote social change today. Trotter illustrates how analytic theory and practice could function subversively in contemporary American culture. This book is recommended for students and scholars of psychology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and philosophy.

As inequality widens in all sectors of contemporary society, we must ask: is psychoanalysis too white and well-to-do to be relevant to social, economic, and racial justice struggles? Are its ideas and practices too alien for people of color? Can it help us understand why systems of oppression are so stable and how oppression becomes internalized? In A People’s Historyof Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, Daniel José Gaztambide reviews the oft-forgotten history of social justice in psychoanalysis. Starting with the work of Sigmund Freud and the first generation of left-leaning psychoanalysts, Gaztambide traces a series of interrelated psychoanalytic ideas and social justice movements that culminated in the work of Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Ignacio Martín-Baró. Through this intellectual genealogy, Gaztambide presents a psychoanalytically informed theory of race, class, and internalized oppression that resulted from the intertwined efforts of psychoanalysts and racial justice advocates over the course of generations and gave rise to liberation psychology. This book is recommended for students and scholars engaged in political activism, critical pedagogy, and clinical work.

Beginning in 1989, more than 8,000 men disappeared in Kashmir. These disappearances were publicly denied, leaving mourners to grapple with unrecognized grief. Drawn from ten years of psycho-historical research in Kashmir, Shifa Haq reflects on the bereaved families’ intricate experiences of mourning. Haq expands the psychoanalytic understanding of loss and argues for a mourning that includes porous affective links with the political.

Trauma and Repair: Confronting segregation and violence in America is an interview-based interdisciplinary exploration of complex trauma in low-income communities and neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland; Oakland, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Elaine, Arkansas. Moving fluidly between the respondents’ life narratives and clinical and academic perspectives on trauma and inequality, Stopford depicts multidimensional and intergenerational trauma, including prolonged economic injustice and repeated exposure to community violence. Written in an accessible and engaging style that draws on insights from sociology, public health, history, legal studies, and clinical psychoanalysis, this original study is a vital addition to the literature on inequality and poverty in the United States.