This book argues that while notions of trauma in mental health hold promise for the advancement of women’s rights, the mainstreaming of trauma treatments and therapies has had mixed implications, sometimes replacing genuine social change efforts with new forms of female oppression by psychiatry. It contends that trauma interventions often represent a "business as usual" approach within psychiatry, with women being expected to comply with rigid treatment protocols, accepting the advice give...

Globally, social workers are committed to human rights and challenging unjust social structures. However, their close ties to the state often reinforce such systems of oppression.The first to apply abolitionist theory from international perspectives to social work, this book examines this contradiction, exploring whether social work can embrace radical change while operating within state structures. Bringing together scholars from the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotla...

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of women's experiences within mental health services, demonstrating the need for a radical paradigm shift in how women's distress and experiences are understood. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on coercive mental health treatment, including interviews, participatory action research, arts-based research, and public sociology, the book centres the knowledge, skills, and creativity of psychiatrised women.Informed by intersectional feminism an...

This book provides a contemporary and practical resource for exploring critical social work practices in mental health. It explores how a power analysis can be enacted, through a variety of skills and actions, in order to navigate complex organisational and social contexts and make a difference in the mental health field.Mental health social work is contested and complex. While it is widely accepted that social workers should bring a social justice lens to their practice, it is oft...

This book will inspire the next generation of social work and human service practitioners to integrate research into their everyday social justice practice. Through highlighting the centrality of values to the task of research and the possibilities for enacting social justice through our research practice, it argues for respectful, meaningful, and just relationships with the people with whom we do research and build knowledge; acknowledges the ongoing impact of colonialism; respects divers...