In A Critical Mental Health Primer, Dr. Jan DeFehr, university professor with over twenty years of clinical social work practitioner experience, provides an overview of critical mental health scholarship, arguing that providing access to critical mental health knowledge is a prerequisite for ethical practice.
Through a peer-reviewed critique of psychiatry and its broad field of mental health, topics explored include scientific critique of evidence; the potential long-term harm caused by mental disorder diagnoses; key concerns related to lack of transparency and procedural justice; anti-colonial critiques of the mental health system; critiques concerning psychiatric drugs and the DSM; ethical standards of care; and practical guidance for supporting one another outside of the dominant mental health model.
A Critical Mental Health Primer is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate level mental health courses across social work, education, health sciences studies, and nursing programs, in both universities and colleges.
FEATURES
A rare collection of non-pathologizing alternatives to current mental health practices that centre collaborative, relational, dialogical, anti-oppressive, and anti-colonial approaches
Offers vital tools for building public access to critical mental health knowledge, learned from first-hand experience and a recent participatory action research project
Pedagogical features include chapter overviews and post-chapter invitations with questions for readers
Chapter 2 Scientific Critique of Mental Disorder Diagnosis
Chapter 3 Mental Disorder Diagnosis and Potential for Harm
Chapter 4 Anticolonial Critique of Mental Health Premises and Practices
Chapter 5 Critique Concerning Psychiatric Drugs
Chapter 6 Professional Ethics: Standards of Care and Subjugation
Chapter 7 Non-pathologizing Ways of Helping
Chapter 8 Building Public Access to Critical Mental Health Knowledge: Tools for Informed Choice
References
Index
Biography
Jan DeFehr, MSW, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Winnipeg.
“This primer offers rich and invaluable reflections, references, resources, and intervention strategies promoting a critical stance in the field of mental health. Written in an engaging and accessible style and providing readers with practical questions and concrete exercises through ‘post-chapter invitations,’ each well-documented chapter of this textbook offers students, researchers, and practitioners across various fields of helping professions the necessary tools to question taken-for-granted assumptions about mental health. This book constitutes an important addition to critical mental health knowledge.”
—Alexandre Baril, author of Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide (2023)
“This book offers a comprehensive analysis of why conventional mental health research and practice need to be genuinely re-oriented based on the perspectives of people who experience these services first-hand. In addition to describing what is wrong with bio-deterministic approaches in psychiatric treatment, Jan DeFehr outlines solutions to improve supports. Her book is based on a wealth of expertise by people who have direct experience from inside the mental health system as patients and staff working for change.”
—Geoffrey Reaume, Associate Professor, Critical Disability Studies, York University, co-editor of Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies
“This is a text for all those concerned with the current colonial mental health system in many Euro-Westernized spaces. It is for those who want to understand how that system operates, often perpetuating misinformation and potential for harm. It is for those who want to learn about ways of ‘being with’ each other that go beyond individualizing and pathologizing practices and towards informed choice in social services, education, and healthcare. In this primer on critical mental health, Jan DeFehr has woven together the critical research, practices and knowledge to both imagine and create better mental health care now.”
—Jennifer Poole, MSW, PhD, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Toronto Metropolitan University
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