Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill

Isaac, Rael Jean & Virginia C. Armat

ISBN 10: 0029153808 / ISBN 13: 9780029153802

Published by Free Press, New York, 1990

About this Item

First Edition/First Printing. Hardcover in unclipped dustjacket. 436 pages. A significant book about severe mental illness, that presents a compelling account of the systemic retreat from caring for the mentally ill that we call "deinstitutionalization" and how it fail. As relevant today as in 1990. Some wear to the dustjacket otherwise a very good dustjacket over a very good and solid book. Ships in well-padded box.

Seller Inventory # 4788

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill
• Publisher: Free Press, New York
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0029153808
• ISBN 13: 9780029153802
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Examines the cultural and political issues surrounding the problem of America's homeless mentally ill

Reviews

Taking aim at advocacy groups who view the homeless as ordinary people down on their luck, the authors of this scorching critique cite findings that 30% to 40% of the homeless suffer from major mental illness, and that a high proportion are substance abusers. Isaac, a sociologist, and freelance journalist Armat, blame the abandonment of the homeless mentally ill on the anti-psychiatry movement (led by Thomas Szasz, Ronald Laing, among others), on civil libertarians and on psychiatrists who foster the "delusion that preventive community psychiatry could eliminate mental illness." Arguing that we have replaced the mental hospital with the 18th-century poorhouse which threw together the mentally ill, the retarded, criminals and the displaced, they warn that a humane system of care will be costly and might involve treatment of some mentally ill persons against their will. Their support for judicious use of electroshock therapy will also stir controversy.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Isaac and Armat, a sociologist and a journalist, respectively, look retrospectively at the causes behind the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s--a phenomena they abhor. Their solution to this monstrous error is to combine community services with active psychiatric treatment. Chapters expose how the "madness myth" started with anti-psychiatry proponents R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, ex-patient groups, and radical psychiatrists like Jeffrey Masson. The authors also lambast lawyers who eliminated involuntary commitment and sued hospitals and doctors for failure to treat. But perhaps the most riveting portion of this well-researched, disturbing, and lucid expository is the devastation wreaked on families by untreated relatives afflicted with mental illness. A good companion to Ann Braden Johnson's Out of Bedlam ( LJ 9/1/90). Recommended for larger collections.
- Janice Arenofsky, formerly with Arizona State Lib., Phoenix
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.