Anti-psychiatry' is a movement more sloganized than analysed. Until now it has been associated in the English-speaking world primarily with R.D. Laing and a coterie of his associates, and a radical critique not just of psychiatric hospitalization but of the very premises of psychiatry itself and the basic institutions of society, especially the family. But are these notions accurate, or rather distorted images, created by Laing himself or by the media? In this book, which has emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch conference held in June 1997, the realities of critical psychiatry are explored, using comparisons and contrasts between the British and the Dutch experiences as a probe. There were, it turns out, various distinct anti-psychiatries - indeed, hardly anybody actually used that label about themselves - and they played a role in the reform no less than the rejection of regular psychiatry.

The comparative global history of mental health care in the twentieth century remains relatively uncharted territory. Psychiatric Cultures Compared offers an overview of various national psychiatric cultures, comparing, for example, advances in Dutch psychiatry with developments abroad. Wide-ranging essays cover analyses of the field of psychiatric nursing, the changing use of psychotropic medicine, the emergence of in- and outpatient mental health sectors, the rise of the anti-psychiatry movement, and a critical look at modern day deinstitutionalization.

From the contents: Moral facts and objective values (Timo Airaksinen). - Values and reasons (Leonardo Rodriguez Dupla). - Rescher on evolution and the intelligibility of nature (George Gale). - The nature of philosophy (John Kekes). - Individual and other-person morality: a plea for an emotional response to ethical problems (Peter Machamer). - Was Spinoza a person? (Raymond Martin).

In Mental Health and Canadian Society leading researchers challenge generalisations about the mentally ill and the history of mental health in Canada. Considering the period from colonialism to the present, they examine such issues as the rise of the insanity plea, the Victorian asylum as a tourist attraction, the treatment of First Nations people in western mental hospitals, and post-World War II psychiatric research into LSD.

The book relates the history of post-war psychiatry, focusing on deinstitutionalisation, namely the shift from asylum to community in the second part of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, psychiatry and mental health care were reshaped by deinstitutionalisation. But what exactly was involved in this process? What were the origins of deinstitutionalisation and what did it mean to those who experienced it? What were the ramifications, both positive and negative, of such a fundamental shift in psychiatric care? Post-War Psychiatry in the Western World: Deinstitutionalisation and After seeks to answer these questions by exploring this momentous change in mental health care from 1945 to the present in a wide range of geographical settings. The book articulates a nuanced account of the history of deinstitutionalisation, highlighting the constraints and inconsistencies inherent in treating the mentally ill outside of the asylum, while seeking to inform current debates about how to help the most vulnerable members of society.

This book explores the fascinating and complex interactions between the ways that culture and education operate within and across societies. In some cases, education is imagined as an integrated part of general cultural phenomena; in others, educational interventions become the means for transforming the cultural circumstances of different populations. The contributors to this volume show how certain educational practices produce new cultural and professional knowledge; discuss the impacts of initially foreign educational ideas and institutions on established cultural institutions in very different societies; and explore the impacts of modernity and modern educational ideas on more traditional gendered and religious practices and communities. The book also provided striking examples of when these impacts were not benign. Increasingly powerful twentieth-century governments attempted to use education and schools to produce new, reformed citizens suitable for their newly created colonial, national, socialist, and fascist states. The expectation was that cultural and social transformation might be engineered, in major part, through schooling. This book was originally published as a special issue of Paedagogica Historica.

Examining the popular discourse of nerves and stress, this book provides a historical account of how ordinary Britons understood, explained and coped with the pressures and strains of daily life during the twentieth century. It traces the popular, vernacular discourse of stress, illuminating not just how stress was known, but the ways in which that knowledge was produced. Taking a cultural approach, the book focuses on contemporary popular understandings, revealing continuity of ideas about work, mental health, status, gender and individual weakness, as well as the changing socio-economic contexts that enabled stress to become a ubiquitous condition of everyday life by the end of the century. With accounts from sufferers, families and colleagues it also offers insight into self-help literature, the meanings of work and changing dynamics of domestic life, delivering a complementary perspective to medical histories of stress.