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The culture of psychiatric diagnosis causes harm. It labels people in distress. It silences them. It takes away their individuality and agency. At its worst, it removes their human rights. It only asks, 'What's wrong with you?' and doesn't ask, 'What happened to you?' It fails to acknowledge…
This book is a revised and retitled second edition of A Straight Talking Introduction to Being a Mental Health Service User (2010). UK mental health services were in crisis when this book was first published. They are in even greater crisis now. This updated second edition offers a cohesive basis for…
This is a book about Covid-19 as it happened, with all the fear, horror, losses, grief, chaos, revelations, frustrations and sheer heroism. It is also a book about the future - what we learned and didn't learn; what we hoped for when the lockdowns eased and we could believe…
This collection of chapters casts a critical eye on the concept of coproduction in our national mental health and learning disability services. Is it naive idealism? A one-way road to co-optioning the independent user/survivor movement? A major challenge to the hegemony of the psychiatric profession? The next progressive step…
Hearing voices, seeing visions and similar out-of-the-ordinary experiences have long intrigued and mystified humankind. The dominant scientific and medical understandings of these phenomena tend to problematise them. This ground-breaking book builds on the work of the Hearing Voices Movement and of the researchers Marius Romme and Sandra Escher in challenging…
The current mainstream way of describing psychological and emotional distress assumes it is the result of medical illnesses that need diagnosing and treating. This book summarises a powerful alternative to psychiatric diagnosis that asks not ‘What’s wrong with you?’ but ‘What’s happened to…
In an era when more people are taking psychiatric drugs than ever before, Joanna Moncrieff’s explosive book challenges the claims for their mythical powers. Drawing on extensive research, she demonstrates that psychiatric drugs do not ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ mental illness by acting on hypothesised…
This is a unique collection of poems written by and for people who have survived our mental health system and the diagnostic process that is used to categorise and treat mental and emotional distress. In October 2016, Jo Watson launched A Disorder for Everyone (AD4E) – an international campaign to…
In 2017 the global #MeToo movement burst through the conspiracy of silence around women’s experience of sexual abuse and violence. Since then, other groups have found the courage to declare that they too have experienced sexual abuse and are unafraid and unashamed to let it be known. Now this…
Human distress has historically been understood and responded to almost exclusively either as a biological disorder or a psychological deficit. This has led to the development of powerful structures, ‘mental health systems’, that have dominated thinking and practice around mental health and been controlled by the psychiatric profession.…
In October 2016 Jo Watson hosted the very first ‘A Disorder for Everyone!’ event in Birmingham, with psychologist Dr Lucy Johnstone, to explore (and explode) the culture of psychiatric diagnosis in mental health. To provide a space to continue the debate after the event, Jo also set up the…
This provocative collection of essays presents a powerful critique of contemporary discourse that portrays work – paid employment – as a moral imperative, essential for our health and well-being. The contributors describe the mental health impact of modern-day workplaces, with their precarity and constant managerial scrutiny. They throw light on…