Stewart presents a history of child guidance in Britain from its origins in the years after the First World War until the consolidation of the welfare state. This is the first study of child guidance in this period and makes a significant contribution to the historiography.
The Intimate State explores how state-supported mental health initiatives made emotional intimacy both politically valued and personally desired during a crucial period of modern British psychiatric and cultural history. Focusing on the transformative decades following World War II, Teri Chettiar narrates the surprising story of how individual emotional wellbeing became conflated with inclusive democracy and subsequently prioritized in the eyes of scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens. This new model of emotional health promoted nuclear families and monogamous marriage relationships as fundamental for individual and political stability and fostered unexpected collaborations between British mental health professionals and social reformers who sought to resolve the Cold War crisis in political and moral values. However, this model also generated backlash and resistance from communities who were excluded from its vision of idealized intimacy, including women, queer people, and adolescents. Ultimately, these communities would foster a new generation of activists who would turn the state agenda on its head by demanding political recognition for marginalized citizens on the basis of emotional health. Through new archival research, The Intimate State traces the rise of a modern psychiatric view of the importance of intimate relationships and the resultant political culture that continues to inform identity politics--and the politics of social equality--to this day.
The concept of Identity Crisis came into usage in the 1940s and it has continued to dominate the cultural zeitgeist ever since. In his exploration of the historical origins of this development, Frank Furedi argues that the principal driver of the ‘crisis of identity’ was and continues to be the conflict surrounding the socialisation of young people. In turn, the politicisation of this conflict provides a terrain on which the Culture Wars and the politicisation of identity can flourish. Through exploring the interaction between the problems of socialisation and identity, this study offers a unique account of the origins and rise of the Culture Wars.
The current surge of displaced and trafficked children, child soldiers, and child refugees rekindles the virtually dead letter of the Genocide Convention prohibition on transferring children of one group to another. This book focuses on the gap between genocide as a legal term and genocidal forcible child transfer as a catastrophic experience that disrupts a group’s continuity. It probes the Genocide Convention’s boundaries and draws attention to the diverse, yet highly similar, patterns of forcible child transfers cases such as colonial genocide in the US, Canada, and Australia, Jewish-Yemeni immigrants in Israel, children of Republican parents during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, and Operation Peter Pan in Cuba. The analysis highlights the consequences of the under-inclusive protection granted only to four groups. Ruth Amir argues effectively for the need to add an Amending Protocol to the Genocide Convention to protect from forcible transfer to children of any identifiable group of persons perpetrated with the intent to destroy the group as such. This proposed provision together with Communications and Rapid Inquiry Procedures will highlight the gravity of forcible child transfers and contribute to the prevention and punishment of genocide.
This historical study of mental healthcare workers’ efforts to educate the public challenges the supposition that public prejudice generates the stigma of mental illness. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book argues that psychiatrists, nurses and social workers generated representations of mental illness which reflected their professional aspirations, economic motivations and perceptions of the public. Sharing in the stigma of their patients, healthcare workers sought to enhance the prestige of their professions by focussing upon the ability of psychiatry to effectively treat acute cases of mental disturbance. As a consequence, healthcare workers inadvertently reinforced the stigma attached to serious and enduring mental distress. This book makes a major contribution to the history of mental healthcare, and critiques current campaigns which seek to end mental health discrimination for failing to address the political, economic and social factors which fuel discrimination. It will appeal to academics, students, healthcare practitioners and service users.
This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice: from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education; from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come. Chapters 3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com
However much policy material is produced, the real function of most child psychiatrists is to assess and treat mental disorders in childhood and adolescence. This is a comprehensive update on the field that will inform the clinical practice of all child and adolescent mental health professionals. The authors bring the medical perspective to bear on psychopathology and demonstrate that our understanding of childhood psychiatric disorders, their origins and their treatments are improving. They write with a particular focus on four contemporary themes – continuity into adult life, the integration of biological and social aetiology, the influence of neuroscience, and the increasing use of research and evidence – and take into account recent changes in DSM-5. Some chapters have been specially commissioned for this book, while previous versions of the others have been published in the journal Advences in Psychiatric Treatment and have now been fully revised and updated in line with the four themes. The new chapters include disorders in 0- to 4-year-olds, Tourette syndrome and the clinically significant topic of anxiety. Other topics include: autism spectrum disorders, behavioural and affective disorders, pharmacology and psychological therapies, fabrication and induction of illness, and gender dysphoria. All the topics covered are central to the work of practising child and adolescent mental health professionals, and many will also be relevant to paediatricians, psychologists, social workers, and trainees in all these fields.
In the light of the complex demographic shifts associated with late modernity and the impetus of neo-liberal politics, childhood continues all the more to operate as a repository for the articulation of diverse social and cultural anxieties. Since the Thatcher years, juvenile delinquency, child poverty, and protection have been persistent issues in public discourse. Simultaneously, childhood has advanced as a popular subject in the arts, as the wealth of current films and novels in this field indicates. Focusing on the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, this collection assembles contributions concerned with current political, social, and cultural dimensions of childhood in the United Kingdom. The individual chapters, written by internationally renowned experts from the social sciences and the humanities, address a broad spectrum of contemporary childhood issues, including debates on child protection, school dress codes, the media, the representation and construction of children in audiovisual media, and literary awards for children’s fiction. Appealing to a wide scholarly audience by joining perspectives from various disciplines, including art history, education, law, film and TV studies, sociology, and literary studies, this volume endorses a transdisciplinary and meta-theoretical approach to the study of childhood. It seeks to both illustrate and dismantle the various ways in which childhood has been implicitly and explicitly conceived in different disciplines in the wake of the constructivist paradigm shift in childhood studies.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. What is autism and where has it come from? Increased diagnostic rates, the rise of the 'neurodiversity' movement, and growing autism journalism, have recently fuelled autism's fame and controversy. The metamorphosis of autism is the first book to explain our current fascination with autism by linking it to a longer history of childhood development. Drawing from a staggering array of primary sources, Bonnie Evans traces autism back to its origins in the early twentieth century and explains why the idea of autism has always been controversial and why it experienced a 'metamorphosis' in the 1960s and 1970s. Evans takes the reader on a journey of discovery from the ill-managed wards of 'mental deficiency' hospitals, to high-powered debates in the houses of parliament, and beyond. The book will appeal to a wide market of scholars and others interested in autism.