Summary
Contents
Subject index
`Fast becoming a contemporary classic... this book tries both to be critical and engender critical thinking in a number of ways. It offers an overview of a number of theories that address human distress as well as particular forms of "pathology". This book effectively highlights the way that western society has taken "normal"; and "abnormal" emotional states to be factual entities rather than the constructed understandings of human phenomena that they are.... should be on the reading list of every course//module that attends to human distress' - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis This practical and accessible critique of the institutions, practices and presuppositions that underlie the st
Alternatives to Abnormality
In this chapter we review some of the alternative ways of looking at psychopathology that have developed alongside mainstream psychiatry. Psychoanalytic, anti-psychiatry, family therapy and cognitive approaches each provide spaces of resistance and form curious alliances with psychiatric models, and we review some of the advantages and disadvantages of these in the course of the chapter.
There is a close historical link between moral and medical treatments of mental distress. Foucault (1971) argues that this entails bringing into being mental chains which the person weaves for him- or herself as they take on board attributions of responsibility for their abnormal state of mind and for the progress of their cure. This link between morality and medicine has ...
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