Interrogating the relationship between women and psychosis from a variety of perspectives, this edited collection explores personal, literary, spiritual, psychological, biological, and psychodynamic approaches. The contributors reflect on medieval mystics and witches, postpartum psychosis, disordered eating, art and literature, feminism, and male/female differences in schizophrenia. Women with experience of psychosis, psychotherapists, and a shaman provide first-person accounts to give the...

The Anthropology of Religious Conversion paints a picture of conversion far more complex than its customary image in anthropology and religious studies. Conversion is very seldom simply a sudden moment of insight or inspiration; it is a change both of individual consciousness and of social belonging, of mental attitude and of physical experience, whose unfolding depends both on its cultural setting and on the distinct individuals who undergo it. The book explores religious conversion in a ...

For the families of schizophrenics, fear, guilt, frustration, and despair can become part of daily life. Several years ago the authors of this volume established a program at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto to help the families of schizophrenics cope with the sometimes debilitating emotions they typically experience. The first edition of Living and Working with Schizophrenia grew out of that program. Published to international acclaim in 1982, it offered practical ad...

Parental Psychiatric Disorder presents an innovative approach to thinking about and working with families where a parent has a mental illness. With 30 new chapters from an internationally renowned author team, this new edition presents the current state of knowledge in this critically important field. Issues around prevalence, stigma and systems theory provide a foundation for the book, which offers new paradigms for understanding mental illness in families. The impact of various parental ...

Following World War II and the exposure of the concentration camps, psychiatry turned its attention to a vast range of cultural concerns with results that seemed to indicate a decline of stigma over time. However, it is now clear that whatever drives prejudices, especially in the case of anti-Semitism, was just dormant and perhaps not fully understood. Hate crimes and anti-Semitism broad recently re-emerged in Europe, and the United States followed shortly thereafter. The US Federal Bureau...