MACMILLAN Critical Mental Health in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Social and Historical Perspectives (The Politics of Mental Health and Illness)

This interdisciplinary volume examines the social production of mental health and illness in Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand). It draws together cutting-edge critical mental health scholarship from the region, to interrogate how personal, community, institutional and mediated relations, make and remake experiences of ‘mental health.’ In the wake of the widespread insertion of psy-considerations into everyday lives, here contributors demonstrate how the relations between communities, practices, professionals and institutions often replicate long-standing histories of discrimination and violence motivated by psychiatric classification, even as the psy-disciplines move into supposedly more transformational domains: digital technology, schooling, human resources, and social media, for example. The book’s chapters reflect the current diversity within academic studies of mental health and illness in Australia and Aotearoa. This includes a wide range of case studies from war trauma in the Australian military and pornography addiction, to the depathologisation of trans health and peer workers in mental health services. Critical Mental Health in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand offers unique insights particular to the region, to students and scholars of critical psychology, history, sociology, medical humanities, and education.