Overview

Editor:

Pauline Savy
La Trobe University, VIC

The social landscape for understanding and responding to mental illness has changed rapidly. Timed to coincide with the Senate Select Committee Report ('Not for Service', 2005), this volume offers timely analyses of the social and consumer implications from the closure of large psychiatric asylums across Australia.

As the 'Not for Service' report indicates, changes resulting from activism, sociological critique, legislation, neo-liberal philosophies, elevation of the role of family, the privatisation of psychiatry, increasing and contested psychiatric diagnoses, and pharmacological ascendancy, have re-shaped the social situation for individuals ('consumers') with mental illness and their carers.

Contributors to the issue provide a historical overview of Australian asylums. They consider the implications of current arrangements for the care and rehabilitation of afflicted individuals within the community and families, the citizenship of the mentally ill, the bureaucratic framing of emergency psychiatric care, and the experiential worlds of caregivers and patients. Caregivers, students, researchers and mental health professionals alike will benefit from this insightful examination of current mental health care practices.

Table of Contents

Closing Asylums for the Mentally Ill: Social Consequences

Foreword: Time for Governments to Act on Mental Health Care
Sev Ozdowski

Guest Editorial: Outcry and Silence: Social implications of asylum closure in Australia
Pauline Savy

In sight, in mind: Mental health policy in the era of deinstitutionalisation
Katy Richmond, Pauline Savy

Mental health reform, citizenship and human rights in four countries
Michael Hazelton

Neo-liberalism, community care and Australian mental health policy
Julie Henderson

Can Deinstitutionalisation Work?: Mental Health Reform from 1993 to1998 in Victoria, Australia
Valerie Gerrand

Deinstitutionalisation: an unrealised desire
Janice Chesters

From therapy to administration: Deinstitutionalisation and the ascendancy of psychiatric 'risk thinking'
Anne-Maree Sawyer

Everyday life following long term psychiatric hospitalisation
Clare Hocking, Janet Phare, Jan Wilson

Epilogue: The Mental Health Reform Cakewalk: Moving Forwards Backwards
Daphne Habibis

Book Reviews

Closing Asylums for the Mentally Ill: Social Consequences
Reviewed by Dianne Wynaden

Closing Asylums for the Mentally Ill: Social Consequences
Reviewed by Anthony J O'Brien