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A sobering assessment of the systematic failures of mental health work.

The United States is in the midst of a mental health crisis that cannot be ignored. Its effects are visible in overcrowded emergency rooms, homeless encampments, and frequent encounters between police and people with serious mental illness. And yet, our attempts to support people with mental illness—from medical care to housing support to basic hygiene—seem to never take meaningful hold despite the tireless work of professionals who attempt to help people bring together the pieces of a life. The problem is not in any individual effort though; it’s in the many ways these programs fail to work together. For those with serious mental illness, and those who work to ameliorate it, there is no system. There is only mess. 

In A Mad Mess, sociologist Owen Whooley uncovers the exasperating barriers, bureaucratic mismatches, and threadbare resources that have made a mess of what should be a supportive system. Set in Albuquerque, New Mexico—a city whose struggles echo those of communities nationwide—the book reveals the challenges mental health workers face daily, from tedious paperwork to occasional violence. Whooley follows workers across local outpatient service organizations, specialized police mental health units, and a psychiatric emergency department. Despite mostly good intentions and sometimes heroic efforts, he shows why this important work so often ends in failure. 

Written with deep sympathy and unflinching honesty, A Mad Mess reveals how the lack of a cohesive mental health system obstructs critical care and places roadblocks before front-line mental health workers at every turn. Most critically, for those who suffer from severe mental illness, these setbacks are a constant reminder that the institutions charged with helping them have left them on their own.

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilisation. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.

Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their own fields explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a 'clash of civilisations', as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilisation itself.

This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world and shows how catastrophe can be avoided.

Contributors: Albert Flores, Joan C. Callahan, Jill Powell, Kenneth Kipnis, Al Gini, Howard Cohen, Martin Gunderson, Joseph A. Edelheit, Michael Pritchard, Vincent J. Samar, Sohair ElBaz, William Pardue, and the editors.

On a summer night in 415 BCE, unknown persons systematically mutilated most of the domestic “herms”—guardian statues of the god Hermes—in Athens. The reaction was immediate and extreme:  the Athenians feared a terrifying conspiracy was underway against the city and its large fleet—and possibly against democracy itself.   The city established a board of investigators, which led to informants, accusations, and flight by many of the accused.  Ultimately, dozens were exiled or executed, their property confiscated.

This dramatic period offers the opportunity to observe the city in crisis. Sequential events allow us to see the workings of the major institutions of the city (assembly, council, law courts, and theater, as well as public and private religion). Remarkably, the primary sources for these tumultuous months name conspirators and informants from a very wide range of status-groups: citizens, women, slaves, and free residents. Thus the incident provides a particularly effective entry-point into a full multifaceted view of the way Athens worked in the late fifth century.

Designed for classroom use, Athens 415 is no potted history, but rather a source-based presentation of ancient urban life ideal for the study of a people and their institutions and beliefs.  Original texts—all translated by poet Robert B. Hardy—are presented along with thoughtful discussion and analyses by Clara Shaw Hardy in an engaging narrative that draws students into Athens’ crisis.