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140 books match the query 'Mental Health' and 6 start with d

cover of Depression: A Public Feeling

Depression

A Public Feeling

Ann Cvetkovich

Duke University Press, 2012

In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism.

Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.

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cover of Disorder in the Court: Morality, Myth, and the Insanity Defense

Disorder in the Court

Morality, Myth, and the Insanity Defense

Andrea L. Alden

University of Alabama Press, 2018

The first book-length rhetorical history and analysis of the legal and moral questions behind the insanity defense.

The insanity defense is considered one of the most controversial, most misunderstood, and least straightforward subjects in the American legal system. Disorder in the Court: Morality, Myth, and the Insanity Defense traces the US legal standards for the insanity defense as they have evolved from 1843, when they were first codified in England, to 1984, when the US government attempted to revise them through the Insanity Defense Reform Act. Throughout this period “insanity” existed primarily as a legal term rather than a medical one; yet the testimony of psychiatric experts is required in cases in which an insanity defense is raised.

The adjudication of such cases by courtroom practice is caught between two different but overlapping discourses, the legal and the medical, both of which have historically sought to assert and maintain firm disciplinary boundaries. Both expert and lay audiences have struggled to understand and apply commonplace definitions of sanity, and the portrayal of the insanity defense in popular culture has only served to further frustrate such understandings.

Andrea L. Alden argues that the problems with understanding the insanity defense are, at their foundation, rhetorical. The legal concept of what constitutes insanity and, therefore, an abdication of responsibility for one’s actions does not map neatly onto the mental health professions’ understandings of mental illness and how that affects an individual’s ability to understand or control his or her actions. Additionally, there are multiple layers of persuasion involved in any effort to convince a judge, jury—or a public, for that matter—that a defendant is or is not responsible for his or her actions at a particular moment in time.

Alden examines landmark court cases such as the trial of Daniel McNaughtan, Durham v. United States, and the trial of John Hinckley Jr. that signal the major shifts in the legal definitions of the insanity defense. Combining archival, textual, and rhetorical analysis, Alden offers a close reading of texts including trial transcripts, appellate court opinions, and relevant medical literature from the time period. She contextualizes these analyses through popular texts—for example, newspaper articles and editorials—showing that while all societies have maintained some version of mental illness as a mitigating factor in their penal systems, the insanity defense has always been fraught with controversy.

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cover of Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know about Shock Treatment

Doctors of Deception

What They Don't Want You to Know about Shock Treatment

Andre, Linda

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Mechanisms and standards exist to safeguard the health and welfare of the patient, but for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—used to treat depression and other mental illnesses—such approval methods have failed. Prescribed to thousands over the years, public relations as opposed to medical trials have paved the way for this popular yet dangerous and controversial treatment option.

Doctors of Deception is a revealing history of ECT (or shock therapy) in the United States, told here for the first time. Through the examination of court records, medical data, FDA reports, industry claims, her own experience as a patient of shock therapy, and the stories of others, Andre exposes tactics used by the industry to promote ECT as a responsible treatment when all the scientific evidence suggested otherwise.

As early as the 1940s, scientific literature began reporting incidences of human and animal brain damage resulting from ECT. Despite practitioner modifications, deleterious effects on memory and cognition persisted. Rather than discontinue use of ECT, the $5-billion-per-year shock industry crafted a public relations campaign to improve ECT’s image. During the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatry’s PR efforts misled the government, the public, and the media into believing that ECT had made a comeback and was safe.

Andre carefully intertwines stories of ECT survivors and activists with legal, ethical, and scientific arguments to address issues of patient rights and psychiatric treatment. Echoing current debates about the use of psychopharmaceutical interventions shown to have debilitating side-effects, she candidly presents ECT as a problematic therapy demanding greater scrutiny, tighter control, and full disclosure about its long-term cognitive effects.
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cover of Doing Nothing

Doing Nothing

James Currie

Duke University Press, 2026

Doing Nothing is a book about doing nothing in a system where there is always something pressing that ought to be done. Not the productive unstructured time of self-help books, but the aimless and ineffective doing nothing of procrastination, resignation, and melancholia. James Currie pursues these themes across a wide terrain of experiences, materials, and examples from the personal, local, and anecdotal, through to the existential, cosmological, and apocalyptic—reflecting, among other things, on the COVID pandemic, the lives of teenagers, Lars Van Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, work, play, and politics. Doing Nothing offers a lived-in embrace of queer states of being that stand against liveliness and the mournful feelings of entrapment and shame that exist alongside the unexpected opportunities such situations afford.
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cover of Double Jeopardy: Adolescent Offenders with Mental Disorders

Double Jeopardy

Adolescent Offenders with Mental Disorders

Thomas Grisso

University of Chicago Press, 2004

In the twenty-first-century world of juvenile justice policy and practice, nearly everyone agrees that one of the most pressing issues facing the nation's juvenile courts is their proper response to delinquent youths with mental disorders. Recent research indicates that about two-thirds of adolescent offenders in juvenile justice facilities meet the criteria for one or more mental disorders. What are the obligations of our juvenile justice system, then, as the caretaker for delinquent youth with such disabilities? How do issues of adolescent development create special challenges in determining the court's proper response to delinquents with special mental health needs? Thomas Grisso considers these questions while offering new information to assist the juvenile justice system in its responses to the needs of our children.

Double Jeopardy considers the newest data on the nature of youths' mental disorders—their relationships to delinquency, the values and limits of methods to treat them, and the common patterns of adolescent offending. That information is used to chart a rational course for fulfilling the juvenile justice system's duty—as a custodian of children in need of health care, as a legal system promoting fairness in youth adjudication, and as a protector of public safety—to respond to delinquent youths' mental disorders. Moreover, Double Jeopardy provides a scientific yet practical foundation for lawmakers, judges, attorneys, and mental health care professionals, as well as researchers who must fill the knowledge gaps that limit the juvenile justice system's abilities to meet youths' mental health needs.
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cover of dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss

dear elia

Letters from the Asian American Abyss

Mimi Khúc

Duke University Press, 2024

In dear elia Mimi Khúc revolutionizes how we understand mental health. Khúc traces the contemporary Asian American mental health crisis from the university into the maw of the COVID-19 pandemic, reenvisioning mental health through a pedagogy of unwellness—the recognition that we are all differentially unwell. In an intimate series of letters, she bears witness to Asian American unwellness up close and invites readers to recognize in it the shapes and sources of their own unwellness. Khúc draws linkages between student experience, the Asian immigrant family, the adjunctification of the university, and teaching methods pre- and post-COVID-19 to illuminate hidden roots of our collective unwellness: shared investments in compulsory wellness and meritocracy. She reveals the university as a central node and engine of unwellness and argues that we can no longer do Asian American studies without Asian American mental health—and vice versa. Interspersed throughout the book are reflective activities, including original tarot cards, that enact the very pedagogy Khúc advances, offering readers alternative ways of being that divest from structures of unwellness and open new possibilities for collective care.
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