Psychology & Psychiatry : Mental Illness

What precipitates mental breakdown? How do people experience such extremes – and how do they see others’ interpretations and interventions? Most important, how do people recover from these episodes and get their lives back? These are some of the questions addressed in this anthology of first-hand accounts of mental breakdown and recovery. Eleven very different stories together shed light on what triggers mental breakdown, what it is like to be ‘mad’, whether treatment helps and how people reclaim themselves and their lives. Based on tape-recorded interviews with people who have been through a mental breakdown and come out the other side of it, The Madness of Our Lives breaks the silence around mental distress and offers hope and optimism to mental health service users and their carers. more...

Price: $29.95

What causes psychiatric disorders to appear? Are they primarily the result of people’s environments, or of their genes? Increasingly, we are told that research has confirmed the importance of genetic influences on schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disord more...

Price: $34.95

Written by front line professionals in the fields of nursing, mental health, prison services and the law, this text is an essential companion to the government's new suicide prevention strategy. The contributors offer a wealth of practical guidance on issues such as risk assessment and management in a range of settings, policy and the legal framework around suicide. Exploring the links between self-harm and suicide, the authors present international approaches to training in suicide prevention for professionals and preventative initiatives targeting wider communities. They debate the legality and morality of assisted self-harm and analyse the rate and causes of suicide among specific groups, including Black and minority ethnic groups, people in custody and people with mental illnesses. This manual provides health, social care and criminal justice professionals with all the most up-to-date information needed to make a positive contribution to suicide prevention in institutional and community settings. more...

Price: $32.95

Jennifer Newton, author of the successful Preventing Mental Illness (Routledge, 1989) completes her study for MIND in this investigation of what constitutes good practice in the field of preventive medicine. more...

Price: $27.95

This thought-provoking book investigates the impact of racism (both conscious and unconscious) in mental health settings, covering individual clinical encounters and the broader picture of service provision. The authors offer insights into manifestations of racism in contemporary Britain; racial and cultural identity and the significance of these in psychotherapy; and the inequalities in provision of mental health services to minority ethnic communities. They consider the problems of racism and mental health, not in isolation but in the larger context of cultural difference and social inequalities, and also on the level of human relationships. Bringing together the experiences of mental health professionals and incorporating a service user's perspective, this book provides many practical strategies for addressing racism and dealing with its effects in psychiatric work, and will prove useful and informative to practitioners in many areas of mental health work. more...

Price: $37.95