WORK AND MADNESS

The Rise of Community Psychiatry

Diana Ralph

As the treatment of mental health disorders continues to expand outwards, beyond the domain of psychiatric institutions, the nature and implications of intensified psychiatric intervention is a cause for concern to all of us.

A social worker, teacher and community activist, Diana Ralph takes on contemporary community mental health systems. In a meticulously researched and highly readable work, the growth and change in the definition and treatment of mental health disorders is subjected to a concerned and scholarly scrutiny.

Ralph finds available theories, from the liberal to the Marxist to the radical antipsychiatry approaches, inadequate in accounting for these changes. Instead, she locates the ideological origins of community psychiatry within the tradition of industrial psychology, and is able to show how its operations is linked to the needs of contemporary industrial management in their efforts to defuse dissatisfaction and alienation in the workplace.

“Concise, well-written, thoroughly researched, with excellent sources.”--Choice

Diana Ralph teaches social work at the University of Regina.

Table of Contents

I. Labour and Community Psychiatry

II. Why Community Psychiatry? Four Theories

III. The Labour Theory of Community Psychiatry

IV. The Industrial Parentage of Community Psychiatry

V. The Nationalization of Industrial Psychology 

VI. Community Psychiatry in a Threatened Empire 

VII. Implications and Strategy

Footnotes

Bibliography 

Index

Acknowledgments