The book Madness Contested has recently been published by PCCS Books. It’s a collection of articles, edited by Steven Coles, Sarah Keenan, and Bob Diamond.
The book is a remarkable piece of work. It covers just about every contentious concept in the present “mental illness” debate, and brings to bear an abundance of new insights and up-to-date research findings.
There are 21 articles plus an introduction by the editors.
Here’s the name of each article with a brief quotation from each:
Introduction:
“We believe the dominant ideology in mental health services has restricted our collective and individual conceptualization, discourse and action regarding madness.”
1. The Persistence of Medicalisation: Is the presentation of alternatives part of the problem? Mary Boyle
“…the more we point out the explanatory emptiness of diagnoses, the more we encourage people to ask for and expect different kinds of explanation.” (p 19)
2. Paranoia: Contested and contextualized. John Cromby & Dave Harper
“We have suggested that intensely distressing episodes of paranoia should be seen as habits of felt thinking and action acquired in response to events in the social world.” (p 33)
3. Meaning, Madness and Marginalisation. Steven Coles
“Those who are eventually considered mad by society have suffered some form of marginalization and disempowerment in their trajectory to madness, either relationally, socially, materially, or culturally.” (p 43)
4. From Constructive Engagement to Coerced Recovery. Alastair Morgan & Anne Felton
“Organisational culture and a fear of being blamed is recognised as a barrier for staff to supporting individuals to take therapeutic risks…creating tensions for promoting risk taking and ultimately recovery.” (p 69)
5. Mental Disorder and the Socio-ethical Challenge of Reasonableness. David Pilgrim & Floris Tomasini
“Thus social contingencies and specific social norms define when unreasonableness is deemed to be pathological, is sometimes ignored, and sometimes even socially valued.” (p 85)
6. The Pharmaceutical Industry and Mental Disorder. Joan Busfield
“Whilst it can be argued that this widening of the boundaries of mental illness helps to enable those with mental health problems to get the treatment they may need, equally it can be argued that it facilitates the pathologisation of individuals, locating the problem within them, and helping to ensure that the social and environmental factors that often give rise to their mental states and behviour are largely ignored.” (p 107)
7. Clinical Psychology in Psychiatric Services: The magician’s assistant? Steven Coles, Bob Diamond & Sarah Keenan
“One way of exposing some of the iatrogenic effects of the power imbalances and problematic practices within the psychiatric system is to provide a public space to openly debate such issues.” (p 117)
8. Manifesto for a Social Materialist Psychology of Distress. Midlands Psychology Group
“Distress is not the consequence of inner flaws or weaknesses.” (p 123)
9. Soteria: Contexts, practice and philosophy. Philip Thomas
“The failure of technological psychiatry to improve the outcome for people who experience psychosis, the serious harm associated with the long-term use of neuroleptic medication, and at a fundamental level, the failure of science to explain madness, have resulted in a crisis in contemporary psychiatry.” (p 154)
10. Recovery, Discovery and Revolution: The work of Intervoice and the Hearing Voices Movement. Eleanor Longden, Dirk Corstens & Jacqui Dillon
“The emergence of the service user/survivor movement in the 1980s and 1990s heralded a new level of protest against prevailing medical ideologies and the dehumanizing regimes of traditional psychiatric services.” (p 167)
11. Experiential Knowledge and the Reconception of Madness. Peter Beresford
“What can particularly help mental health service users/survivors to challenge existing psychiatric interpretations and develop their own viewpoints and ideas is getting together and working with others with shared experience.” (p 189)
12. Service User-led Research on Psychosis: Marginalisation and the struggle for progression. Jan Wallcraft
“The opinions and perspectives of those labeled psychotic have often been seen as globally lacking credibility and have been marginalized.” (p 198)
13. The Patient’s Dilemma: An analysis of users’ experiences of taking neuroleptic drugs. Joanna Moncrieff, David Cohen & John Mason
“One respondent taking haloperidol explained that ‘I feel like a zombie. I can’t think clear and my movement is slow’.” (p 219)
14. Speaking Out Against the Apartheid Approach to Our Minds. Rufus May, Rebecca Smith, Sophie Ashton, Ivan Fontaine, Chris Rushworth & Pete Bull
“Over this time period I have discovered the process of trying to change psychiatry from within is flawed, because workers are too identified with interests of the corporate institution.” (p 235)
15. Toxic Mental Environments and Other Psychology in the Real World Groups. Guy Holmes
“Some come to feel that their life has been wasted. One man who had been involved with psychiatric services for over 25 years said to me that the only point of his life seemed to be to provide work and therefore pleasure and meaning to staff who were paid to help him.” (p 259)
16. Redressing the Balance of Power: Psychiatric medication in Nottingham. Nottingham Mind Medication Group
“Linking with others has helped to lift feelings of powerlessness and allowed us the opportunity to make social networks and gain social support.” (p 273)
17. Ordinary and Extraordinary People, Acting to Make a Difference. Leicester Living with Psychiatric Mediation Group
“An important theme in our critical understanding of the world is power, and the structures within which it is withheld or asserted. Language is one such structure and we want to draw attention to words that we find potentially problematic, words such as ‘patient,’ for example, are therefore put in quotation marks.” (p 278)
18. Peer Support. Becky Shaw
“When I was in hospital I received all my help from the other patients and not from the staff which you might have expected.” (p 293)
19. A Critical Journey from Involvement to Emancipation: A narrative account. Theo Stickley
“There are opportunities to develop new models and approaches that go beyond involvement and that are genuinely emancipatory for people who use mental health services.” (p 313)
20. Rebuilding the House of Mental Health Services with Home Truths. Bob Diamond
“Clinical psychology must remain open to the critique that whilst it continues to work in this environment it props up the dominant oppressive psychiatric culture.” (p 329)
21. A Beacon of Hope: Alternative approaches to crisis – learning from Leeds Survivor Led Crisis Service. Fiona Venner & Michelle Noad
“As an organization set up to be an alternative to psychiatric services we are fiercely opposed to the use of psychiatric diagnoses. We pride ourselves on providing a non-medical approach to working with extreme mental distress. Our philosophy is about being alongside people in crisis, not treating them. We also believe passionately in the transformative and healing power of human connection.” (p 337)
SUMMARY
I don’t normally write such lengthy book reviews. This work, however, is simply outstanding. If you have concerns about the mental health system, I strongly recommend that you buy it, read it, re-read it, and keep it close. That’s what I’ll be doing.
DISCLOSURE
I have no financial ties to this book or to any of the books endorsed on this website.