Searching for a Rose Garden: challenging psychiatry, fostering mad studies - Softcover

Edited Collection

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910919233 ISBN 13: 9781910919231

Publisher: PCCS Books, 2016

Synopsis

Searching for a Rose Garden is an incisive critique of all that is unhelpful about sanestream understandings of and responses to mental distress. Drawing on world-wide survivor activism and scholarship, it explores the toxicity of psychiatry and the co-option and corruption of survivor knowledge and practice by the mainstream. Chapters on survivor research and theory reveal the constant battle to establish and maintain a safe space for experiential knowledge within academia and beyond. Other chapters explore how survivor-developed projects and practices are cultivating a wealth of bright blooms in the most hostile of environments, providing an important vision for the future. Referencing Joanne Greenberg s book I Never Promised you a Rose Garden, this collection demonstrates the challenge, determination and successes of the authors in working towards a paradigm shift in the understanding of madness and distress.

About this title

About the Author

Jasna Russo comes from former Yugoslavia and is based in Berlin, Germany where she works as an independent researcher. She is a long-term activist in the international user/survivor movement. Jasna has an MA in clinical psychology and has worked on both survivor-controlled and collaborative research projects, including several large-scale international studies. Her articles have been published in anthologies and journals in Germany and the UK. In 2011 Jasna was the main organiser of the international conference "Searching for a Rose Garden. Fostering Real Alternatives to Psychiatry" which inspired this book. Her main interest is in exploring the accumulated knowledge of people treated as mad or 'mentally ill' and whether we can connect across the globe to jointly develop our own, first-person defined model of madness. Angela Sweeney was part of her local survivor movement as a teenager and young adult, and conducted her first survivor research project as an undergraduate student in 1998. Sometime after graduating, she joined the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health to work with Jan Wallcraft on a study of the British Survivor Movement (On Our Own Terms, 2003) before moving to the Service User Research Enterprise at the Institute of Psychiatry where she gained a PhD in medical sociology. She has a particular interest in survivor controlled research, trauma-informed approaches, survivors' perspectives on and experiences of psychiatric services and treatments, and alternatives to mainstream biomedical psychiatry including trauma and social models of causation. She is currently undertaking a five year Post-Doctoral Fellowship exploring assessment processes for talking therapies.

Edition details

• Publisher: PCCS Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1910919233
• ISBN 13: 9781910919231
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 269
• Editor: Jasna Russo, Angela Sweeney