Making Mental Health

A Critical History

Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Routledge
07 August 2024

Psychological theory & schools of thought; Psychological methodology; Health psychology; Medical sociology; Psychotherapy

Series: Critical Approaches to Health

Making Mental Health: A Critical History historicises mental health by examining the concept from the ‘madness’ of the late nineteenth century to the changing ideas about its contemporary concerns and status. It argues that a critical approach to the history of psychiatry and mental health shows them to constitute a dual clinical-political project that gathered pace over the course of the twentieth century and continues to resonate in the present. Drawing on scholarship across several areas of historical inquiry as well as historical and contemporary clinical literature, the book uses a thematic approach to highlight decisive moments that demonstrate the stakes of this engagement in Anglo-American contexts.

By tracing the (unfinished) history of institutions, the search for cures for psychiatric distress, the growing interest of the nation-state in mental health, the history of attempts to globalise psychiatry, the controversies over the politics of diagnostic categories that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of theorising about the relationship between the psyche and the market, the book offers a comprehensive account of the evolution of mental health into a commonplace concern.

Addressing key questions in the fields of history, medical humanities, and the social sciences, as well as in the psychiatry disciplines themselves, the book is an essential contribution to an ongoing conversation about mental distress and its meanings.

By: Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780367367848
ISBN 10: 036736784X
Series: Critical Approaches to Health
Pages: 178
Publication Date: 07 August 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Introduction. 1. Walls. 2. Cures. 3. States. 4. Universals. 5. Discontents. 6. Markets. Conclusion. References.

Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research examines the history of psychiatry and medicine as well as the history of warfare. Between 2016 and 2021 she was an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the university’s Centre for the Study of Violence.