Suchergebnisse

This paper critically interrogates the increasingly popular framework of Gender-based Analysis (GBA) in Canada, as it relates to psychiatry more broadly, and forensic psychiatry more specifically. Through a critical feminist and Mad Studies analysis, we argue that if GBA is to be anything more than rhetoric, it is necessary to ground policies and practices in the knowledge generated by women and service-users themselves. We further point to Mad Studies as an important field for research and an opportunity to look deeper into the 'margins within the margins.'

"Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection disengages from the common forms of discussion about violence related to mental health service users and survivors which position those users or survivors as more likely to enact violence or become victims of violence. Instead, this book seeks to broaden understandings of violence manifest in the lives of mental health service users/survivors, 'push' current considerations to explore the impacts of systems and institutions that manage 'abnormality', and to create and foster space to explore the role of our own communities in justice and accountability dialogues. This critical collection constitutes an integral contribution to critical scholarship on violence and mental illness by addressing a gap in the existing literature by broadening the "violence lens," and inviting an interdisciplinary conversation that is not narrowly biomedical and neuro-scientific."--

This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient "personal story" within mental health organizations. The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having "lived experience" has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore how personal stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from "agents of change" towards one of "disability tourism" or "patient porn." We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption, and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change.

Social policy is often constructed and implemented by people who have little experience of its impact as a service user, but there has been a growing interest in greater public, patient and service user involvement in social policy as both political activity and academic discipline. Social Policy First Hand is the first comprehensive international social policy text from a participatory perspective and presents a new service user-led social policy that addresses the current challenges in welfare provision. A companion volume to Peter Beresford's bestselling All our welfare, it introduces the voices of different groups of service users, starting from their lived experience. With an impressive list of contributors, this important volume fills a gap in looking at social policy using participatory and inclusive approaches and the use of experiential knowledge in its construction. It will challenge traditional state and market-led approaches to welfare