Critiquing the Psychiatric Model is the first Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. Understanding the current systems of psychology and psychiatry is profoundly important. So is exploring alternatives. The Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series presents solicited chapters from international experts on a wide variety of underexplored subjects. This is a series for mental health researchers, teachers, and practitioners, for parents and interested lay readers, and for anyone trying to make sense of anxiety, depression, and other emotional difficulties. Critiquing the Psychiatric Model sets out to present a clear picture of the current “mental disorder paradigm,” one that claims an ability to “diagnose and treat mental disorders” and that provides “medication” as its primary treatment. Critiquing the Psychiatric Model traces the history of the psychiatric model and its “diagnostic manual” and identifies its flaws and problem areas by presenting more than twenty solicited chapters from experts worldwide.

Many published books that comment on the medical model have been written by doctors, who assume that readers have the same knowledge of medicine, or by those who have attempted to discredit and attack the medical practice. Both types of book have tended to present diagnostic categories in medicine as universally scientifically valid examples of clear-cut diseases easily distinguished from each other and from health; with a fixed prognosis; and with a well-understood aetiology leading to disease-reversing treatments. These are contrasted with psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, which are described as unclear and inadequate in comparison. The Medical Model in Mental Health: An Explanation and Evaluation explores the overlap between the usefulness of diagnostic constructs (which enable prognosis and treatment decisions) and the therapeutic effectiveness of psychiatry compared with general medicine. The book explains the medical model and how it applies in mental health, assuming little knowledge or experience of medicine, and defends psychiatry as a medical practice.

Theoretical Alternatives to the Psychiatric Model of Mental Disorder Labeling is the fourth Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. Understanding the current systems of psychology and psychiatry is profoundly important. So is exploring alternatives. The Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series presents solicited chapters from international experts on a wide variety of underexplored subjects. This is a series for mental health researchers, teachers, and practitioners, for parents and interested lay readers, and for anyone trying to make sense of anxiety, depression, and other emotional difficulties. Theoretical Alternatives recognizes and appreciates those who have contributed to the abundance of literature critiquing the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the biomedical model of mental health, and the practice of psychiatric diagnosing. It intends to move past that discourse, and present macro and system-level alternatives to DSM and the ICD diagnosing (the World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), in the form of conceptually developed frameworks, taxonomies, and models to guide clinical work and theory.

Essays written by social work master's degree students responding to the categories of psychological diagnosis issued by the American Psychiatric Association.

In a thought-provoking volume, the author critiques how the human condition has been monetized into the disease of depression and related “disorders” and offers a powerful new approach that updates the best ideas of modern psychology. Original.

This book offers a comprehensive Marxist critique of the business of mental health, demonstrating how the prerogatives of neoliberal capitalism for productive, self-governing citizens have allowed the discourse on mental illness to expand beyond the psychiatric institution into many previously untouched areas of public and private life including the home, school and the workplace. Through historical and contemporary analysis of psy-professional knowledge-claims and practices, Bruce Cohen shows how the extension of psychiatric authority can only be fully comprehended through the systematic theorising of power relations within capitalist society. From schizophrenia and hysteria to Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder, from spinning chairs and lobotomies to shock treatment and antidepressants, from the incarceration of working class women in the nineteenth century to the torture of prisoners of the ‘war on terror’ in the twenty-first, Psychiatric Hegemony is an uncompromising account of mental health ideology in neoliberal society.