Searching for a Rose Garden: challenging psychiatry, fostering mad studies - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910919233 ISBN 13: 9781910919231

Publisher: PCCS Books, 2016

Synopsis

This edited collection introduces and explores radical alternatives to mainstream psychiatric practices. Crucially, these are not alternatives developed by professionals; they are innovative, survivor-led and survivor-run grassroots approaches. The contributors describe their origins, how they were developed, the challenges they faced, and continue to face, and the politics that inspired and continue to inform them.

About this title

About the Author

Jasna Russo comes from former Yugoslavia and is based in Berlin, Germany where she works as an independent researcher. She is a long-term activist in the international user/survivor movement. Jasna has an MA in clinical psychology and has worked on both survivor-controlled and collaborative research projects, including several large-scale international studies. Her articles have been published in anthologies and journals in Germany and the UK. In 2011 Jasna was the main organiser of the international conference "Searching for a Rose Garden. Fostering Real Alternatives to Psychiatry" which inspired this book. Her main interest is in exploring the accumulated knowledge of people treated as mad or 'mentally ill' and whether we can connect across the globe to jointly develop our own, first-person defined model of madness. Angela Sweeney was part of her local survivor movement as a teenager and young adult, and conducted her first survivor research project as an undergraduate student in 1998. Sometime after graduating, she joined the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health to work with Jan Wallcraft on a study of the British Survivor Movement (On Our Own Terms, 2003) before moving to the Service User Research Enterprise at the Institute of Psychiatry where she gained a PhD in medical sociology. She has a particular interest in survivor controlled research, trauma-informed approaches, survivors' perspectives on and experiences of psychiatric services and treatments, and alternatives to mainstream biomedical psychiatry including trauma and social models of causation. She is currently undertaking a five year Post-Doctoral Fellowship exploring assessment processes for talking therapies. She has two young children, a partner, and a cat.

Review

Searching for a Rose Garden is an exceptionally insightful collection, in which contributors reflect on the successes, setbacks, and ongoing challenges in contesting and supplanting psychiatry. There is an arresting quality to these essays, which express the urgency of needing to find other ways of caring, and are grounded in a deep appreciation of other ways of being. The transformative effects of the collective knowledge woven together in this book will reverberate for decades to come. Dr Richard Ingram, Independent Mad Studies researcher. Searching for a Rose Garden is a profoundly important volume. Comprehensive. Modern. Bold. Accessible. Survivor-produced research, knowledge, and practice offers concrete examples of people rejecting and altering mental health systems around the world. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever heard the word psychiatry. Lauren J. Tenney, PhD, MPhil, MPA, Psychiatric Survivor A vital contribution to the building of Mad Studies as a discipline grounded in activist scholarship. This is a comprehensive and accessible must-read for those interested in building real alternatives to the limited, and often damaging, approaches to madness and distress that dominate today. Its scope is impressive, drawing together a wide range of contributions to show the best of survivor knowledge and practice, whilst raising questions concerning the politics of inclusion, identities and co-production within this field. Searching for a Rose Garden serves as a record and celebration of, and a challenge to, survivor knowledge and activism; in doing so it preserves and provokes in equal measure. Dr Brigit McWade, Sociology Department, Lancaster University.

Edition details

• Publisher: PCCS Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1910919233
• ISBN 13: 9781910919231
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200
• Editor: Russo Jasna, Sweeney Angela