Modern Mental Health: Critical Perspectives on Psychiatric Practice

Abstract

Peter Beresford's foreword suggests that the book that follows is something of a radical critical reader, but that is not quite the case. The strength of Modern Mental Health is the fact that it is most often focused on current service and practice arrangements, and so is able to offer practice enhancements and service improvements that are in keeping with contemporary service delivery. I would recommend that the prospective reader selects between chapters based on their own need, and the book is most likely to appeal to people in practice or local line management, as well as students with work based learning tasks. The text is structured in three sections The Human in the System, The Importance of Context in Psychiatry and Contemporary Developments and Reflections. Taking each section in turn, there are four chapters in section one, beginning with Walker's A Survivor's Story. It is curious that this account leans towards a biomedical formulation of her ‘mental illness’, while feeling at the mercy of clinicians, some who fail ‘to listen’. The tension in these positions is interesting for being less resolved than the activist survivor position, or that of the compliant patient. Castillo's chapter on recovery in personality disorder (itself a useful reiteration that recovery applies when working with people with diagnosed personality disorders), and Kaminsky's et al. chapter on shared decision making in medication management, are small scale research-based presentations of innovation in service delivery. Both exemplify my comment above about not being critical, as much as enhancing of service provision.