Dwight Fee 
Pathology and the Postmodern 
Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience

`This is a wonderful volume, powerfully written, timely, insightful, and filled with major pieces; the passion, intellectual rigor and sense of history found here promises to shape this field in the decades to come. This volume sets the agenda for the future′ –
Norman K Denzin, University of Illinois

`A beautifully crafted manuscript which re-invigorates the rather stale debate between the traditionalists and the anti-psychiatry schools of thought…. For all those working in mental health arenas the journeying through this text will be highly rewarding indeed. Stick with it.′ – Mental Health Care

`This is a book which will apeal to those interested in theoretical debates rather than to practitioners who may find it heavey weather if they have not had the time or resources to engage with what are often quite difficult and often dense writings′ – British Journal of Social Work

`This book.. present[s] a clarity that is vivid…. This book would be a good place for psychiatrists to start′ – British Journal of Psychiatry

Pathology and the Postmodern explores the relationship between mental distress and social constructionism using new work from eminent scholars in the fields of sociology, psychology and philosophy.

The authors address: how specific cultural, economic and historical forces converge in contemporary psychiatry and psychology; how new syndromes, subjectivities and identities are being constructed and deconstructed in technological, culturally mediated and hyper-reflexive contexts; and what new critiques of positivism and new understandings of `pathology′ seem viable, given these still emerging scenarios.

Building upon work in such areas as labelling theory, feminist studies, linguistics, and post-structuralism, the twelve chapters engage the cultural, historical and political conditions that should be implicated in our understanding of contemporary mental suffering.

Table of Content

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

The Broken Dialogue – Dwight Fee

Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience

PART TWO: PSYCHIATRIC DISCOURSE AND MENTAL LIFE IN POSTMODERN SPACES

Escape from Insanity – Simon Gottschalk

`Mental Disorder′ in the Postmodern Moment

Performing Methods – Jackie Orr

History, Hysteria and the New Science of Psychiatry

The Project of Pathology – Dwight Fee

Reflexivity and Depression in Elizabeth Wurtzel′s /f003Prozac Nation

PART THREE: PATHOLOGY AND SELFHOOD: NEW AND CONTESTED SUBJECTIVITIES

The Self – Kenneth J Gergen

Transfiguration by Technology

Modernists at Heart? Postmodern Artist Breakdowns and the Question of Identity – Mark Freeman

A Dangerous Symbolic Mobility – Janet Wirth-Cauchon

Narratives of Borderline Personality Disorder

Is it Me or Is it Prozac? Antidepressants and the Construction of Self – John P Hewitt, Michael R Fraser and Leslie Beth Berger

PART FOUR: TOWARD NEW APPROACHES: EPISTEMOLOGY, RESEARCH, POLITICS

Psychological Distress and Postmodern Thought – Vivian Burr and Trevor Butt

Women′s Madness – Jane Ussher

A Material-Discursive-Intrapsychic Approach

Grammar and the Brain – S R Sabat and Rom Harr[ac]e

Does a Story Need a Theory? Understanding the Methodology of Narrative Therapy – Fred Newman

About the author

Dwight Fee is Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Middlebury College, Vermont
CONTRIBUTORS OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA:

Vivian Burr, University of Huddersfield
Trevor Butt, University of Huddersfield
Rom Harr[ac]e, Linacre College, Oxford University
Jane M Ussher, University of Western Sydney