A Critical Mental Health Primer: Towards Informed Choice in Education, Social Services, and Healthcare

Jan N. DeFehr

ISBN 10: 1773384570 / ISBN 13: 9781773384573

Published by Canadian Scholars, 2025

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # B9781773384573

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Critical Mental Health Primer: Towards Informed Choice in Education, Social Services, and Healthcare
• Publisher: Canadian Scholars
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1773384570
• ISBN 13: 9781773384573
• Binding: Paperback / softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 526 grams

About this title

Synopsis

In A Critical Mental Health Primer, Dr. Jan DeFehr, associate professor with twenty years of clinical social work 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.

From the Back Cover

How the mental health system operates within the helping professions is largely misunderstood. A Critical Mental Health Primer shows that this is due, in part, to minimal public access to critical mental health scholarship and a limited understanding of mental health premises and practices. In place of critical peer-reviewed research, practitioners and those seeking support often rely on misinformation and unsubstantiated claims, leading to individual and collective harm. This comprehensive text provides a synthesis of liberatory mental health knowledge, arguing that access to such knowledge is a prerequisite for ethical practice. As an educator with 20 years of clinical social work experience, author Jan N. DeFehr offers a one-of-a-kind compendium of non-pathologizing alternatives to mainstream models that centre collaborative, relational, dialogic, anti oppressive, and anti-colonial support and solidarity. Containing discussions of recent action research projects, analysis of procedural fairness and transparency regarding DSM diagnosis, harm reduction critiques concerning psychiatric drugs, and a final chapter suggesting 15 tools for knowledge mobilization, this text is essential reading for those studying and teaching in social work, education, health studies, and nursing programs.