Psychiatry Interrogated

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction to the Project: IE Researchers Take on Psychiatry

   • Bonnie Burstow

   Pages 1-20

3. Stopping CAMH: An Activist IE Inquiry

   • Bonnie Burstow, Simon Adam

   Pages 21-40

4. A Kind of Collective Freezing-Out: How Helping Professionals’ Regulatory Bodies Create “Incompetence” and Increase Distress

   • Chris Chapman, Joanne Azevedo, Rebecca Ballen, Jennifer Poole

   Pages 41-61

5. Spirituality Psychiatrized: A Participatory Planning Process

   • Lauren J. Tenney, Celia Brown, Kathryn Cascio, Angela Cerio, Beth Grundfest-Frigeri

   Pages 63-80

6. Operation ASD: Philanthrocapitalism, Spectrumization, and the Role of the Parent

   • Mary Jean Hande, Sharry Taylor, Eric Zorn

   Pages 81-101

7. Interrogating the Rights Discourse and Knowledge-Making Regimes of the “Movement for Global Mental Health”

   • Sonya L. Jakubec, Janet M. Rankin

   Pages 103-123

8. Pathologizing Military Trauma: How Services Members, Veterans, and Those Who Care About Them Fall Prey to Institutional Capture and the DSM

   • Lauren Spring

   Pages 125-142

9. The Caring Professions, Not So Caring?: An Analysis of Bullying and Emotional Distress in the Academy

   • Jemma Tosh, Sarah Golightley

   Pages 143-160

10. Creating the Better Workplace in Our Minds: Workplace “Mental Health” and the Reframing of Social Problems as Psychiatric Issues

    • Rob Wipond, Sonya Jakubec

    Pages 161-182

11. Lawyering for the “Mad”: Social Organization and Legal Representation for Involuntary-Admission Cases in Poland

    • Agnieszka Doll

    Pages 183-202

12. By Any Other Name: An Exploration of the Academic Development of Torture and Its Links to the Military and Psychiatry

    • Efrat Gold

    Pages 203-226

13. Back Matter

    Pages 227-241

    PDF

This edited volume is an anthology of institutional ethnography (IE) inquiries into psychiatry—the first ever to be written.  It focuses on a large variety of different geographic locations and constitutes a major contribution to anti/critical psychiatry, as well as institutional ethnography.  Themes include the DSM, the use and protection of problematic psychiatric research, the penetration of psychiatry into the workplace. Adding depth and breath, the contributors, while all are schooled in IE, come from a large variety of walks of life, authors including: academics, psychiatric survivors, investigative reporters, activists, nurses, artists, and lawyers—each bringing their own unique expertise/standpoint to bear. The result is an intellectually rigorous book, contributions to several disciplines, ammunition for activism, and a compelling read that cannot be put down.

• Psychiatry
• Psychology
• Institutional Ethnography
• History of Psychiatry
• Social Work
• Social Policy
• Disability Studies
• Madness Studies
• Gender Studies
• Sociology of Health and Medicine

“Psychiatry Interrogated is a powerful and compelling work, that demonstrates how common reactions of the how-can-that-happen? variety can serve as springboards to unraveling and exposing the complex, repressive, and inherently destructive nature of psychiatry. Each chapter has an extensive reference list for those who wish to pursue any of the topics in greater depth. The book is dedicated to ‘everyone everywhere who has ever fallen prey to institutional psychiatry.” (Psychiatric Survivors, psychiatricsurvivors.wordpress.com, February, 2017)

“Psychiatry Interrogated is a powerful and compelling work, that demonstrates how common reactions of the how-can-that-happen? variety can serve as springboards to unraveling and exposing the complex, repressive, and inherently destructive nature of psychiatry. Each chapter has an extensive reference list for thosewho wish to pursue any of the topics in greater depth. The book is dedicated to ‘everyone everywhere who has ever fallen prey to institutional psychiatry.’” (Mad in America, madinamerica.com, January, 2017)

“This is the first book I am aware of to combine critical interrogation of the relations of psychiatry with approaches influenced by institutional ethnography. Chapters open up for investigation a number of the terrains of psychiatric practice that must be challenged and transformed. For those concerned with psychiatry as a ruling relation this is an important opening up of inquiry.” (Gary Kinsman, scholar, activist, and co-author of “The Canadian War on Queers and an editor of Sociology for Changing the World”)

“The institutional ethnography focus distinguishes this book from any other book that is critical of psychiatry.  Likewise, the critique of psychiatry within its pages enters into several under-explored corners of psychiatric oppression and thus distinguishes it from any other book written in the field of institutional ethnography.  This book, then, must be read as an important contribution not only to sociology and institutional ethnography, but also to the theorizing and exposing of psychiatry as a regime of ruling taking place within critiques of psychiatry.” (Brenda A. LeFrançois, Professor, School of Social Work, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, and Editor of “Intersectionalities”)

• Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

  Bonnie Burstow

Bonnie Burstow is Associate Professor at University of Toronto, Canada.  She is also a philosopher, feminist therapist, and antipsychiatry activist. Other works include: Psychiatry and the Business of Madness (2015),  Radical Feminist Therapy (1992), Psychiatry Disrupted (2014), ”Toward a Radical Understanding of Trauma and Trauma Work”, and “A Rose by Any Other Name: Naming and the Battle against Psychiatry”

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