This book emerged out of a website, the Icarus Project, which has been helping a brilliant and disparate group of folks find ways to talk about manic depression that make sense to the people living with it, and helps them to live better lives rather than backing them into corners. This book began as a way of bringing these conversations onto the written page and into the hands of people who might not spend time on the internet. It has evolved to be a set of alternative roadmaps for people who are trying to take care of themselves and live out their dreams. Now in a new revised, expanded tenth anniversary edition!
Part mad manifesto, part revolutionary love letter, part freight train adventure story — Maps to the Other Side is a self-reflective shattered mirror, a twist on the classic punk rock travel narrative that searches for authenticity and connection in the lives of strangers and the solidarity and limitations of underground community. Beginning at the edge of the internet age, a time when radical zine culture prefigured social networking sites, these timely writings paint an illuminated trail through a complex labyrinth of undocumented migrants, anarchist community organizers, brilliant visionary artists, revolutionary seed savers, punk rock historians, social justice farmers, radical mental health activists, and iconoclastic bridge builders. This book is a document of one person’s odyssey to transform his experiences navigating the psychiatric system by building community in the face of adversity; a set of maps for how rebels and dreamers can survive and thrive in a crazy world.
In Brilliant Imperfection Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure—the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds. The stories he tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, Clare weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, he adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure. Ultimately Brilliant Imperfection reveals cure to be an ideology grounded in the twin notions of normal and natural, slippery and powerful, necessary and damaging all at the same time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a popular diagnosis for America’s problems was that society was becoming a madhouse. In this intellectual and cultural history, Michael E. Staub examines a time when many believed insanity was a sane reaction to obscene social conditions, psychiatrists were agents of repression, asylums were gulags for society’s undesirables, and mental illness was a concept with no medical basis. Madness Is Civilization explores the general consensus that societal ills—from dysfunctional marriage and family dynamics to the Vietnam War, racism, and sexism—were at the root of mental illness. Staub chronicles the surge in influence of socially attuned psychodynamic theories along with the rise of radical therapy and psychiatric survivors' movements. He shows how the theories of antipsychiatry held unprecedented sway over an enormous range of medical, social, and political debates until a bruising backlash against these theories—part of the reaction to the perceived excesses and self-absorptions of the 1960s—effectively distorted them into caricatures. Throughout, Staub reveals that at stake in these debates of psychiatry and politics was nothing less than how to think about the institution of the family, the nature of the self, and the prospects for, and limits of, social change. The first study to describe how social diagnostic thinking emerged, Madness Is Civilization casts new light on the politics of the postwar era.
An honest, relatable guide that can help you figure out how to live your life with bipolar disorder, from a bipolar author. Welcome to the Jungle focuses on bipolar people, not the diagnosis: the ways in which each person can find his or her own way through the extreme emotional states and intense experiences that we are calling “bipolar” —whether that means medication or meditation, psychiatrists or vision quests, good sleep or good all-night dancing, or a little bit of everything. Many bipolar books are too clinical, too alarmist, and too clearly written for family members and caretakers of people diagnosed with this mood disorder. Welcome to the Jungle is different. Author Hilary Smith wrote this guide because it is the book she wishes she’d been given when she was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It answers questions, points to resources, and most of all, comes from someone who understands what it’s like to be thrown off course by an overwhelming mental health issue—and what to do afterwards. Just like for everyone else, there are many, many paths that bipolar people can take in life. Learn more about how to live your own life with a mental illness using the help of the insights in Welcome to the Jungle, which covers topics such as:Wrapping your head around triggers, causes of mood swings, medications, and therapistsRecovering from mental breakdowns, manic moments, and major depressive episodesLiving your life beyond the diagnosis—and helping your family to do the same This book is not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent any illness or act as a substitute for advice from a doctor or psychiatrist. Praise for Welcome to the Jungle “Among the wealth of works on bipolar, this title (wisely pulled from a Guns N’ Roses lyric) nicely stands out as a super reference for younger readers interested in or actually experiencing bipolar disorder and is also a valuable resource for professionals.” —Library Journal
We live in an era of depression, a condition that causes extensive suffering for individuals and families and saps our collective productivity. Yet there remains considerable confusion about how to understand depression. Depression: Integrating Science, Culture, and Humanities looks at the varied and multiple models through which depression is understood. Highlighting how depression is increasingly seen through models of biomedicine—and through biomedical catch-alls such as "broken brains" and "chemical imbalances"—psychiatrist and cultural studies scholar Bradley Lewis shows how depression is also understood through a variety of other contemporary models. Furthermore, Lewis explores the different ways that depression has been categorized, described, and experienced across history and across cultures.
Compassion is widely regarded as an important moral emotion – a fitting response to various cases of suffering and misfortune. Yet contemporary theorists have rarely given it sustained attention. This volume aims to fill this gap by offering answers to a number of questions surrounding this emotion. These questions include: What is the nature of compassion? How does compassion differ from other emotions, such as empathy, pity, or gratitude? Is compassion a virtue? Can we have too much compassion? How does compassion influence other mental states (desires, motivations, beliefs, and intentions) and behaviour? How is compassion influenced by the environment? Must compassion be deserved? Can one be moral while lacking the capacity for compassion? Compassion, like other emotions, has many facets – biological, social, psychological and neural, among others. The contributors to this volume will draw on a variety of disciplines and methods in order to develop a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of this often-neglected moral emotion.
