Income, education, employment, housing, the wider environment, and social supports; far more than the actions of physicians, nurses, and other health care providers, it is these conditions that make the greatest difference in our health. Drawing on his experiences as a family physician in the inner city of Saskatoon, Mozambique, and rural Saskatchewan, Dr. Ryan Meili uses scholarship and patient stories to explore health determinants and democratic reforms that could create a truly healthy society. By synthesizing diverse ideas into a plan for action based on the lived experiences of practitioners and patients, A Healthy Society breaks important ground in the renewal of politics toward the goal of better lives for all Canadians.

A Healthy Society offers a new approach to politics – and a new approach to building a healthier world. Dr. Meili argues that health delivery too often focuses on treatment of immediate causes and ignores fundamental conditions that lead to poor health, such as income, education, employment, housing, and environment. This updated edition explores the positive steps that have been taken since publication of the first edition, and includes expanded discussions of basic income, poverty reduction strategies, innovative housing polices, carbon pricing, and the role of health professionals in working for health equity. This book breaks important ground, showing us how a focus on health can change Canadian politics for the better.

Society and the Healthy Homosexual by George Weinberg, Ph.D., was hailed as a landmark when first published. It is the book that pioneered the concept of widespread prejudice against homosexuals--homophobia. It explores the psychological factors underlying that prejudice and offers advice to help individuals overcome the prejudice and accept their sexuality.

A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.

Ideally, the public fund behind this insurance would be derived from a progressive income tax."--BOOK JACKET.

Now in its second edition, Pursuing Health and Wellness looks beyond health as a mere absence of disease to explore the structural and behavioural factors that affect it. Advocating for the creation of healthy societies throughout, the text's three-part organization examines health as a socialconstruct; the social and personal determinants of health and wellness; and the components of our health-care system.