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In this personal, irreverent book, Carl Walker represents the average stories of average people whose lives are routinely and often unnoticeably held together by the people who work in the NHS. These are the people who patch us up, sew us up, radiate, advise scan, plaster, console, repair, inject and support us, before delivering us back home to carry out our everyday affairs. A sharply observed collection of sometimes outrageous, often excruciating but always entertaining accounts of different interactions with one of Britain's greatest treasures

Depression and Globalisation is an important academic text on the political aspects of depression, specifically the relationship between globalisation and depression. In this text Dr. Walker reestablishes the link between mental health research and treatment, along with the political and economical influences outside the world of academic and clinical mental health. Overall, this book will accomplish the task of how closely and inextricably linked these diverse fields are and the way they operate together to produce not only a cultural representation of mental illness but influence the extent and type of mental distress in the 21st century.

An understanding of personal debt requires an understanding of the complex social systems that produce poverty. By drawing upon international perspectives, this book investigates why more and more people are in debt, why it is causing so much mental distress and exactly who is benefiting from what has become the world's number one growth industry

This handbook highlights a range of ground breaking, radical and liberatory clinical and critical community psychology projects from around the world. The disciplines of critical community psychology and clinical psychology are currently experiencing radical innovations that in this book are characterised as moving from the individualising practice realm toward an altogether more contextualising orientation. Both fields are responding to an array of political, social and economic injustices and a global political context. Community and clinical psychologists have found themselves reorienting their practice to confront, resist and subvert the structures that are so damaging to the lives of the vulnerable people they work with. This text posits that these approaches refute and resist the psychologising that has strengthened oppressive structures. Such practices are starting to engage in the political character of power-knowledge relationships that demand a more 'action-oriented' and less 'clinical' psychology praxis and there is a growing interest in, and commitment to, social justice in the field of mental wellbeing.Using examples of scholar, activist and practitioner work from around the world, this collection explores and documents those practices where the traditional remits of community and clinical psychology have been subverted, altered, stretched, changed and reworked in order to reframe practice around human rights, creativity, political activism, social change, space and place, systemic violence, community transformation, resource allocation and radical practices of disruption and direct action

Acknowledgements -- Contents -- 1: Introduction: Conceptualising Mental Health in the Twenty-First Century -- An (Admittedly Shaky) Version of the UK in 2050 -- The Retirement of 'Mental Health' -- Back to 2016: This Book -- The Chapters in This Book -- References -- 2: The Flawed Assumptions of Psychology and Psychiatry: A Martian Analysis -- Surely Everyone Already Knows that Distress Is Social? -- What the Misunderstandings Look Like When Distress Is Treated Asocially: The DSM -- The Self-fulfilling Prophecy of Diagnoses -- Understanding and Misunderstanding Recovery -- Misunderstanding Treatments -- Do We Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater? -- References -- 3: Social Approaches to Distress: From Enclosures to Fluid Spaces -- Enclosing the 'psyCommons' -- Everyday Magic and Helpfulness -- The Helpful Social -- Helpful and Fluid Spaces -- Conclusion -- References -- 4: 'Bike Minded'-Normal Human Encounters (on Bikes) -- 'Ron' -- First Arrival -- A Fluid Space -- A 'Humanistic Flexibility' -- Belonging -- 'A Nice Atmosphere' -- Waiting Rooms -- Conclusion: Some Reflections on Ron's Experience at Bike Minded -- References -- 5: Fishing and Youth Work, or 'What Is It about Fishing that Makes Life Better'? -- How We Got to Write the Bid -- So How Did Our Project Get Started? -- What Did We Do on the Project? -- Hope and Making Sense Together -- Fishing as Knowledge Exchange -- Fishing as Calming and Contemplative -- Fishing as a Mode of Being -- Fishing and Beauty -- Conclusion -- References -- 6: 'Helping Them Hold Up Their World'-Parents of Children with Complex Needs and the Beneficent Organisation -- Meet 'the Therapist' -- The Importance of the Amaze DLA Therapist: Validation, Finance and Mental Well-being -- A Social Perspective on Distress for Parent Carers -- References -- 7: I'm Singing in the Rain

"Based on recent data gathered from employees and managers, Work and the Mental Health Crisis in Britain challenges the cultural maxim that work benefits people with mental health difficulties, and illustrates how particular cultures and perceptions can contribute to a crisis of mental well-being at work"--Provided by publisher

This paper problematizes the ways in which the policy process is conceived in published psychological research. It argues that these conceptions of the policy process fail to ade- quately reflect the real-world dynamism and complexity of the processes and practices of social policy-making and implementation. In this context, psychological evidence needs to be seen as one type of evidence (amongst many others). In turn this requires researchers to take account of broader political processes that favour certain types of knowledge and disparage others. Rather than be regarded as objective and scientific, policy in this characterisation is regarded as a motivated form of politics. This multi-layered, multi-level hybrid structure is not immediately amenable to the well-intentioned interventions of psychologists. While the tendency of many psychologists is to overestimate the impact that we can have upon policy formation and implementation, there are examples where psychological theory and research has fed directly into UK policy developments in recent years. This paper draws on the recent Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative and the work of personality researcher Adam Perkins on the UK's social security system to ask whether psychology has a sufficiently elaborated sense of its own evidence base to legitimately seek to influence key national areas of public policy. The article cautions against dramatic changes to policy pre- dicated upon any one reading of the variegated and, at times, contradictory psychological evidence base. It concludes that, in order to meaningfully contribute to the policy develop- ment process in a way which increases equality and social justice, psychologists need to be more strategic in thinking about how their research is likely to be represented and mis- represented in any particular context. Finally some possible directions for psychologists to take for a more meaningful relationship with policy are suggested.

An article published in : The Australian Community Psychologist, vol. 24, no. 2, November 2012, pp. 135-142 ; At first sight there appear to be, internationally, many diverse, radical, manifestations of community psychology. However, community psychology has gradually become decreasingly diverse and decreasingly radical the more it has become academically and professionally established and evangelised and it is now endangered as a critical alternative to the disciplinary ideologies, theories, procedures and practices of mainstream psychology. As a consequence, the interests of people whose lives are most characterised by immiseration, suffering, social injustice and oppression are increasingly blighted and increasingly threatened. However, these reactionary developments were and are not inevitable and can be reversed by those collectively committed to community critical psychologyIn this paper, despite many differences in our constituting contexts, approaches and work, we come together in solidarity as community critical psychologists to emphasise our common commitment to the development and enactment of community critical psychologies, and our common opposition to the dominant community (acritical) psychologies. The ordering of terms is significant here. We are committed to the wider spectrum of critical psychologies which expose and contest community injustice and misery rather than to the subset of community psychologies which are critical in standpoint. We are critical in relation to oppressive and unjust societal arrangements but also critical in relation to community psychologies, and other manifestations of 'psy', which collude with or actually construct and maintain oppression and injustice. Although the concept of community is central to community critical psychology, it is remarkable how seldom and howsuperficially the notion of community has been subjected to critical – that is, historical, political and ideological – critique by community psychologists who use the term (Fryer & Laing, 2008; Kagan, Burton, Duckett, Lawthom, & Siddiquee, 2011). In dominant discourses, community is usually positioned either as a 'safe', 'warm', and 'friendly' 'place' or as one which is marginal, amoral, anomic, foreboding, forbidding and frightening. Because the uncritical construction of community can lead to a justification for processes of 'othering', exclusion and apartheid-construction through boundary drawinge

The Brighton Citizen's Health Services Survey (BCHSS) was developed to explore and potentially challenge how knowledge is used and by whom in the production of local health commissioning institutions and relations. Through the creation of an 'animating set of questions', it sought to open up spaces through which to make visible some of the ways of knowing and valuing the NHS and health services that had been minimised through the commensuration practices of post-2012 public engagement. In this way there was a clear agenda to facilitate a form of knowledge democratisation which opened up and validated different 'health publics', in order to explore and broaden participative engagement opportunities. The paper provides an account of the project. It considers the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this example of 'evidence-based activism', reflects on the impact of the project on local commissioning and considers the range of controversies that arose as a result of the work. It explores the way that research straddling the boundary between academic inquiry and political activism speaks to the many issues that are prevalent in the changing HE sector as well as NHS privatisation, health commissioning and public sector cuts. ; peerReviewed ; publishedVersion