Suchergebnisse

This paper examines conflicts in polices in England and Wales pertaining to the demand for alternative, non-medical crisis support for those experiencing 'psychosis'. We examine the limitations of current treatment, policy and legislative frameworks in supporting these demands. In particular, we focus on the limitations of prevailing conceptualisations of 'human rights', 'social inclusion' and 'recovery'. These concepts, we argue, are embedded within a broader treatment framework which renders medication as mandatory and all other treatment modalities as inherently subsidiary, and a broader policy framework which is complicit with bio-medical orthodoxies of 'mental illness' and prioritises treatment compliance and compulsion. Therefore, in order to advance a 'human rights' approach to mental health policy, we argue that reigning orthodoxies inherent within policy and practice must be explicitly challenged to open up spaces for the availability of alternatives.

Whether mental health problems should be viewed as disabilities is a pressing concern, especially since the inclusion of psychosocial disability in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This book explores the challenges of applying disability theory and policy, including the social model of disability, to madness, mental illness and distress. It brings together leading scholars and activists from Europe, North America, Australia and India, to explore the relationship between madness, distress and disability and enhance our collective understanding of the issues.

This paper examines gender issues in relation to a mental health project in England, which is based on football metaphor and aimed at engaging men in therapeutic activity. We use the football related analogy of "playing by the rules" to explore how gender was framed, performed, negotiated and contested in the project. We note three different "games" at play within the project: football, gender, and therapy. We argue that gender had a doubled character in the project. The prevailing rules of gender and football were re-reinforced, for example, through defensive heterosexuality and binary ideas about sex and gender. Yet, at the same time, engaging in the project meant these very same rules were transgressed through the enactment of care, concern and group bonding. We conclude that whilst there probably has been a shift in culturally dominant forms of masculinity, any generalized endorsement of "inclusive masculinity" is probably over-stated.