Our everyday lives are increasingly intertwined with psychiatry and
discussions of mental health. Yet the dominant medical discipline of
psychiatry remains surrounded by controversy. Is mental distress really
an illness like any other, treatable by drugs? Can psychiatrists
differentiate between mental disorders normal eccentricities, anxieties
or even sadness? Should the power of psychiatrists be challenged by the
knowledge of those with lived experience of mental ill health?
In this penetrating analysis, Nikolas Rose critiques the powerful part
that psychiatry has come to play in the lives of so many across the
world. A series of chapters, each tackling an area of dispute head on,
opens wide the terrain of debate addressing issues such as advances in
brain science, the politics of Western psychiatry's spread across the
globe, and recent evidence of social adversity's role in producing
mental ill health. The answers we find to these pressing questions will
shape the psychiatric futures that are being brought into existence.
Ultimately, this book proposes a radically different future, no less
evidence-based or rigorous, and indeed far more attuned to the realities
of mental health, and argues that, as a branch of social medicine,
another psychiatry is possible.
