Pathology and the Postmodern

In this wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between mental distress and social constructionism, eminent cross-disciplinary scholars rework modernist assumptions about the phenomenology of mental dysfunction. 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 and understandings of `pathology' seem viable, given these still emerging scenarios.

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