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"This new edition provides vital updates and significantly expanded coverage. Importantly, this edition that has been updated to the Revised DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Included is a new chapter on patienthood and sections on epigenetics, social class, race, gender, community care, and more topics"--

"Canada has long been recognized as a leader in the field of psychiatric epidemiology, the study of the factors affecting mental health in populations. However, there has never been a book dedicated to the study of mental disorder at a population level in Canada. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the discipline uses data from the country's first national survey of mental disorder, the Canadian Community Health Survey of 2005, to fill that gap.

AbstractAre mental disorders (autism, ADHD, schizophrenia) natural kinds or socially constructed categories? What is at stake if either of these views prove to be true? This paper offers a qualified defence for the view that there may be natural kinds of mental disorder, but also that the implications of this claim are generally overestimated. Especially concerns about over-inclusiveness of diagnostic categories and medicalisation of abnormal behaviour are not addressed by the debate. To arrive at these conclusions the paper opens with a discussion of kind formation in science, followed by an analysis of natural kinds. Seven principled and empirically informed objections to the possibility of natural kinds of mental disorder are considered and rejected. The paper ends with a reflection on diagnostics of mental health problems that don't fall into natural kinds. Despite the defence of the possibility of natural kinds of mental disorder, this is likely to be the majority of cases.

In its final report the Expert Committee on reform of the Mental Health Act 1983 chaired by Professor Genevra Richardson proposed a new Mental Disorder Tribunal. This tribunal would have fundamentally different functions, composition, procedure and powers to the present Mental Health Review Tribunals (MHRTs). The Committee's objective was not merely to repair the failings of the present MHRT system but to replace it with a new structure promoting the principles of patient autonomy and non-discrimination. Reading the Committee report and the Government's Green Paper proposals in response together it soon becomes clear that the Government has rejected the recommendation that the new mental health law should be based on principles of autonomy and nondiscrimination. In their place the Green Paper puts "safety" and "risk". While it will incorporate safeguards to ensure compliance with the Human Rights Act 1998, the "dual aims" of the new Mental Health Act are to be to ensure the health and safety of patients and safety of the public. Whereas the Committee saw the new tribunal as an active guarantor and promoter of individual rights the Green Paper recasts it as a body preoccupied with risk and safety, stating as a fundamental "principle" that: "Issues relating to the safety of the individual patient and of the public are of key importance in determining the question of whether compulsory powers should be imposed"