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Book Club

This is a group for members who want to suggest , recommend or review books they are currently reading in the mental health field.

Members: 13
Latest Activity: May 19, 2017

Discussion Forum

books that have inspired me

Started by steve lyon May 13, 2014. 0 Replies

A book that most affected me in my formative career development was "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" by Ken Kesey and it is till relevant today. Perhaps more than any lesson I have delivered, this…Continue

Fiction, Poetry, Relating to Mental Health

Started by William Park. Last reply by William Park May 8, 2014. 4 Replies

Hi, I'm going to be recommending a few books I've read recently ... or not so recently ... so, I'll be back ...William Continue

The Boy with the Topknot

Started by Jill Anderson Apr 29, 2014. 0 Replies

This thread is for discussion of the Boy with the Topknot by Sathnam Sanghera. We will be discussing the book at a meeting of CCrAMHP (Critical and Creative Approaches to Mental Health Practice) in…Continue

Hearing Voices

Started by Iain McGowan. Last reply by Bob Sapey Nov 23, 2012. 5 Replies

Hi all, Has anyone read this book by Simon McCarthy Jones? Excellent read! Below is my review published in the Psychologist (Sept 2012). Hearing Voices: The Histories, Causes and Meanings of Auditory…Continue

Comment Wall

Comment by Jill Anderson on October 15, 2012 at 12:22
Members of this group may be interested in the Madness and Literature Network:
 
This was recently posted to their mailing list:
MLN Member Saara Jantti hasoffered to send out a copy of her new book "Bringing Madness Home: The Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary". She says, 'it is an attempt to read madness and its treatment in three different psychiatric and cultural contexts through their effects on what Martin Heidegger has called the human way of being in the world, the practices of dwelling'. Would anyone who is interested in reviewing this book for the MLN site please email Saara direct on saara.jantti@jyu.fi. The review will need to be completed within 4 weeks of the book being sent and uploaded directly to the site.
Comment by Bill Penson on October 20, 2012 at 14:38

That sounds really interesting but to get the most out of it I think I would want time to read the 3 texts it uses.

Comment by Jill Anderson on October 22, 2012 at 16:21

Yes.  Can understand that.  Just in case of interest, here is the abstract for Saara Jantti's dissertation, on which the book is based (it gives more of an idea of the focus of each of the three books:

This study brings together two  contested themes in feminist debates: madness and home. While both have  been analyzed as sites of women’s oppression, they have, too, been  celebrated as liberatory spaces. Through a close reading of three  women’s writings on the experience and treatment of madness in three  different cultural and psychiatric contexts, this study discusses and  challenges these views. To bring madness home is a methodological move  that seeks to combine (post)structural and phenomenological readings on  women’s madness. It engages the feminist debates on women’s madness, the  critical discourse on madness where home has been first and foremost  understood as a site of oppression that drives women mad, with more  recent debates on gendered notions of home that deconstruct and  reconstruct notions of home. Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water (1961) is an asylum story where home consists of the (imaginary) home in  the World outside the asylum and the lived everyday realities of the  hospital. The patients settle for minimal home spaces in the hospital  and maintain a nostalgic relation to the home in the outside world. In  Bessie Head’s narrative madness is perceived as a journey, a violent  intrusion of the protagonist’s homespace in the village where she, a  refugee from South Africa is settling. In Prozac Diary the  protagonist’s world as she knows collapses when her new medication  removes her multiple ails. Depending on the  historical/cultural/psychiatric context, home becomes a space where  madness removes the ailing subject or where she endures it and creates  sites where the inevitable pain and suffering entailed in the experience  of madness can be tolerated. These sites are homes. Material and  immaterial, livable spaces, where the subject can dwell.

From:

https://www.jyu.fi/en/news/archive/2012/06/tiedote-2012-06-04-12-19...

Comment by Bill Penson on October 23, 2012 at 18:04

This was really helpful and I've emailed Saara for  a copy to review.

Comment by Jill Anderson on December 11, 2012 at 17:38

Am not reading this. . . but thought that someone else might be interested to!

Learning and Education for a Better World: the role of social movem...

This is a book for activists, students, scholars of social movements and adult education and for the public interested in the contemporary movements of our times. From the streets of Barcelona and Athens, the public squares in Cairo, Tunis and Tripoli, the flash mobs and virtual learning of the #Occupy movement, and the shack dwellers of South Africa people around the world are organising themselves to take action against the ravages of a capitalism that serves the greedy while impoverishing the rest. Social movements have arisen or re-arisen in virtually every sector of human activity from concerns about the fate of our planet earth, to dignity for those living with HIV/AIDS, to feeding ourselves in healthier ways and survival in places of violent conflict. At the heart of each of these movements are activists and ordinary people learning how to change their lives and how to change the world. This book offers contemporary theoretical and practical insights into the learning that happens both within and outside of social movements. Social movement scholars present work linked to the arts, to organic farming, to environmental action, to grassroots activists in the Global South, to the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the shackdwellers movements, school reform and the role of Marx, Gramscii and Williams in understanding social movement learning.

The greatest contribution of this inspiring book is to remind us that learning and education in social movements help to make a difference. Not only does this collection enable us to understand how we might theorise and historicise learning in diverse contemporary social movements, but its contributors do so with outspoken and passionate commitment to ‘Learning and Education for a Better World.’ - Professor Miriam Zukas, Executive Dean, Birkbeck, University of London

The burning demand for such a text comes from our contemporary moment that is witness to a world where nearly everything is commercialised, marketised or commodified. This text shuns an essentialist discourse while simultaneously and masterfully offering unprecedented insights into social movement learning and education. The book is numinous. - Professor Robert Hill, University of Georgia, USA

This is a book we have all been waiting for. The editors have brought together an amazing cadre of international adult educators to probe the intersection of social movements and learning, and to build theory around the many social actions that are taking place globally. A must read for students and professors everywhere. - Leona English, PhD, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada

Comment by Bill Penson on January 21, 2013 at 18:12

It took me longer than anticipated to do the review for Saara's book but here it is:

Book Review: Jäntti, S. (2012) Bringing Home Madness: The Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’s ‘Faces in the Water’, Bessie Head’s ‘A Question of Power’ and Lauren Slater’s ‘Prozac Diary’.  Jyväskylä:University of Jyväskylä

 

Jäntti’s PhD thesis aims to intersect madness, feminism(s) and the home in three texts (named in the book title) which recall varying degrees of autobiography for Frame, Head and Slater.  Despite being framed as a ‘humanities’ publication there is clearly a wider implication for praxis.  I am very curious about the cross-over between social science epistemologies and those of the humanities especially since despite their roots having commonalities (philosophical underpinnings, literary delivery), social sciences aspire to empiricism, with dispassion as its style.  There is nothing in Jäntti’s writing that suggests she has gone off into a flight of fancy, and the close reading of the texts she works with shows an attention to detail and scholarly intent; her conclusions are anchored both within theory and within the books and their intellectual contexts. As a result this calls to question, I believe, whether there is an easy location for this book or a settled place for social sciences writing.  This is considered to an extent in a section Jäntti writes on medical humanities which has something of an uncertain status as a discipline, or a fringe area of medicine, but either way it is a medical humanities and so its position is located.

Comment by Bill Penson on January 21, 2013 at 18:13

part 2(the limit was 4000 characters):

Her methodology is worthy of consideration not least in that it is ambitious.  Jäntti aims to integrate, or draw on, Merleau-Ponty’s work on phenomenology to orientate her research to the lived subjectivity as direct experience, and also Foucault’s ideas of subjectivity constructed through discourse. Jäntti does this in recognition that neither Merleau-Ponty nor Foucault offer sufficient scaffold to support her close reading.  I have a preference to see this expanded and perhaps foregrounded more in the chapters directly dealing with her chosen texts, however, this methodology is worthy of note with regard to my point above; that this is humanities based research that presents a methodology and this method is informed by two thinkers who have greatly influenced the social sciences field. Again this raises for me the question of disciplinary crossover. Finally on methodology, I think there is a small omission in that Head and Frame’s texts occupy a colonial/postcolonial space given their respective South African/New Zealand contexts, and while some small reference is made throughout to a postcolonial body of work, this could have been more  solidly cited, perhaps even in the methodology. A postcolonial reading would continue to reassess meanings of home, madness and the relationship to psychiatry as a product of Western, masculinised, Imperial thought that Jäntti has begun to unsettle.

This idea of links to praxis is perhaps exemplified in the section on Frame’s text titled ‘Home in a handbag’.  This section describes the way in which Frame’s protagonist, Istina, sees that a woman also in the psychiatric institution she is admitted to carries her belongings in a handbag and this bag becomes the container of her home.  It contains the sewing she works on and comes to represent the personal and private spheres otherwise unobtainable in the institutional space. Anyone who has worked in a psychiatric institution will recognise a truth in this character and will have seen the men or women who come to operate their home world in the same mobile way, and who by turn come to be seen as hoarding, obsessive or paranoid.

Comment by Bill Penson on January 21, 2013 at 18:14

part 3:

Jäntti’s treatment of Slater’s ‘Prozac Diary’ brings to a more familiar time and place and highlights a number of tensions in Slater’s narrative; the reliance on Prozac to feel well, while simultaneously the wellness is underwritten by a sense of disenfranchisement. This is referred to by Jäntti as a shift in identity, as well as a new home, from ‘an, old illness-based identity and a new self that does not seem compatible’ (Jäntti, 2012, p.235).  In the consideration of this last text we see Jäntti taking an increasingly fluid idea of home which begins to include a sense of self-hood, and an experience of health as a place of dwelling. On first reading this is probably the least applicable section to mental health praxis in one sense, in that here there is a more literary engagement with metaphor, however, by re-engaging a phenomenological perspective we quickly see how the lived subjectivity of dwelling becomes a significant form of knowing neglected in the treatment milieu. How at home in ourselves are we when living in a chemically altered state?

Jäntti’s work leaves us pondering what it means to be in distress, and what it means to use the language of illness to construct a way of being, whether that is through the novel, the autobiography or other forms of narrative.  There are familiar motifs of the discipline area(s) in the concluding sections such as reflections on the nature of belonging and otherness.  To be in madness is to be somewhere, and this lived experience is counterpoised to the construction of being that is constituted and subjectivised through discourse - a not unfamiliar objection found in disability studies areas. The small acts of agency (and the not so small) performed by the mad, cited throughout the book, can be seen also as small acts of opposition towards disciplinary attempts at ‘fixing’ the mad experience.  As such the journey through the thesis leaves us with a familiar conclusion, but also with an engaging, alternative path to it.

 

Comment by Jill Anderson on January 22, 2013 at 22:12

Great review Bill.  Makes me want to read the book.  It also reminded me of this video, about the meaning of 'home', which has stayed with me since I saw it first:

http://www.storyingsheffield.com/stories/home-a-film/

The character limit on comments is a bit annoying isn't it?!  I've pasted the complete review in to a word document in case others find that an easier way to read it.  See here.

Comment by Jill Anderson on February 4, 2013 at 13:56

Hi.  I seem to recommend only books that I am not reading, but would like to if I had time! 

Elements of self destruction - Brent Potter

There is an interesting blog about it here, from which this is an extract:

'This is my first book. Perhaps it represents my own attempt to make sense of the destructive elements of the psyche as they manifest in the individual as well as in broader socio-economic contexts.  I hope to point out the ways in which we are all ‘in the soup’, as it were. We all suffer the madness of our times. Who is deemed ‘mentally ill’ and who is ‘normal’ is really a matter of who is making the decision and within what context. Our level of neurosis, or sociosis, as J.H. van den Berg aptly called it, is really just a matter of degree, but not kind.  In providing clarity of contexts to the elements of destructiveness, I present some ways out of our private and shared madness.'

Further details.

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QMU launches the world's first Masters in Mad Studies

Posted by Jill Anderson on December 1, 2020 at 11:50 0 Comments

Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh is launching the world’s first master’s degree in Mad Studies. The MSc Mad Studies course is primarily a course for graduates with lived experience of mental health issues. It has been hailed by a leading international Mad Studies academic as the most exciting piece of curriculum development in the last 20 years!

Mad Studies is a recognised academic discipline that explores the knowledge and actions that have grown…

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Unlearning through Mad Studies: disruptive pedagogical praxis

Posted by Jill Anderson on October 26, 2020 at 19:00 0 Comments

Medical discourse currently dominates as the defining framework for madness in educational praxis. Consequently, ideas rooted in a mental health/illness binary abound in higher learning, as both curriculum content and through institutional procedures that reinforce structures of normalcy. While madness, then, is included in university spaces, this inclusion proceeds in ways that continue to pathologize madness and disenfranchise mad people.

This paper offers Mad…

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Stepchange: mentally healthy universities

Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:48 0 Comments

Earlier this year, UUK published a refreshed version of its strategic framework, Stepchange: mentally healthy universities, calling on universities to prioritise the mental health of their students and staff by taking a whole university approach to mental health.

The Stepchange approach and shared set of principles inform the …

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Think Ahead gets funding to boost its intake.

Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:41 0 Comments

Fast-track mental health social work provider Think Ahead will expand its intake by 60% from next year following a government funding boost of at least £18m.

The Department of Health and Social Care has agreed a contract with Think Ahead to increase the number of trainees for its 2021 and 2022 cohorts from 100 to 160, with…

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Transforming Mental Health Social Work videos

Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:39 0 Comments

Health Education England has commissioned 11 videos centered on real-life experience of specialists in the social work field.

See the video playlist.

Transforming mental health social work - conference report

Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:37 0 Comments

In February 2020 Health Education England and Skills for Care put on two major conferences about the role and development of mental health social work. 

Download the conference report.

Leadership in mental health social work - web pages

Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:33 0 Comments

A section of the Skills for Care website has been developed for mental health social workers and AMHPs

View the web pages here.

Social work education and training in mental health, addictions and suicide: a scoping review protocol

Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:29 1 Comment

Social workers are among the largest group of professionals in the mental health workforce and play a key role in the assessment of mental health, addictions and suicide. Most social workers provide services to individuals with mental health concerns, yet there are gaps in research on social work education and training programmes. The objective of this open access scoping review is to examine literature on social work education and training in mental health, addictions and…

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Mental health nurse education: perceptions, access and the pandemic

Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:25 0 Comments

With World Mental Health Day this Saturday, a new Nuffield Trust report discusses how more people might be attracted to apply to study mental health nursing, and the reasons why they might currently be less likely to do so.

Co-author Claudia Leone picks out some  key findings.

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