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This paper introduces the concept of 'working utopias' (WUs) and explores their relation to social movements. WUs are used in a variety of ways by social movements, it is argued, and they play a central role in the reproduction and advancement of movements. They reproduce the movement habitus and illusio, extend and reproduce networks, generate new forms of knowledge and practice, and serve, to some extent at least, as 'proof' of the validity of movement claims. Two utopias from within radical mental health movements are focused upon in the paper: the Kingsley Hall therapeutic community and the 'Trieste experiment'. The significance of these working utopias is explored by way of interviews with movement activists who have been involved with them in various ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classic research on unemployment and mental health has focused on the functions of employment. These functions are considered to be of equal importance for all unemployed. A critique of this perspective has been that it views the unemployed as passive and homogeneous. Instead, an agency approach has been suggested, which focuses on the individual goals of the unemployed. This paper develops and tests a model for understanding the differentiated mental consequences of unemployment, which on a theoretical level integrates both the structural restrictions of the unemployment situation and the agency of the individual. The model is based on previous findings which indicate that mental well-being is dependent on the economic need for employment, on the one hand, and on the psychosocial need for employment, on the other hand. The model integrates both these aspects and the results show that the combined effect is of centred importance for the differentiated mental well-being of the unemployed. The analysis is based on a longitudinal survey of 3,500 randomly selected, unemployed Swedes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two main approaches concerning the relation between sexism and psychiatry have been developed in the feminist literature. One, now less fashionable, follows Phyllis Chesler's influential Women and Madness (1972) in emphasising the centrality of sexism within psychiatry and its constructs of mental illness. The other, emphasising the sexism within Society as a whole and the way it generates mental suffering and disturbance, suggests the potential of psychiatry and the mental health professions to ameliorate that suffering. This paper looks once more at the second approach to see whether it should now be abandoned. It analyses the role gender plays within psychiatry, distinguishing three levels of definition and identification -- official definition, the delineation of `normal cases', and the identification of individual cases. It points to the way in which issues of gender impinge on all three levels and argues that there is little evidence of the increasing marginalisation of the dimension of gender within psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract in contemporary western societies the subjective features of social life have become the object and target of a new expertise. The paper addresses the limitations of certain influential approaches to this phenomenon, in particular analyses framed in terms of 'social control' and 'medicalisation'. it offers an alternative framework based on three elements: firstly, a conception of government as a varying set of rationales and programmes which seek to align socio-political objectives with the activities and relations of individuals; secondly, the constitutive roles of psychological and managerial techniques and vocabularies. These are seen to be crucial in the formation of new ways of thinking about and acting on the social relations of the family and the workplace; thirdly, a notion of subjectivity as a capacity promoted through specific regulatory techniques and forms of expertise. This framework is utilised in the analysis of the Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock institute of Human Relations to explore some of the fundamental transformations in twentieth century British society. Three 'case studies' are provided: the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s and l930s; the role of psychological expertise in the Second World War; and the links between industrial productivity, group relations and mental health forged in the immediate post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses an interview describing how K came to be defined by her friends as mentally ill. The method of analysis assumes that the structure of the conceptual scheme `mental illness' which the reader uses in recognizing 'mental illness' is isomorphic with that organizing the text and hence is discoverable 'in' it. The full text of the interview is presented as the data. The analysis explicates the interpretation of the text as a method of reading. The text is found to provide instructions for its interpretation and for the authorization of its facticity. K's mental illness is to be located in the collection of instances of K's behaviour which the interview records. How is behaviour to be described as `mentally ill type' behaviour? It is suggested that the interview as a whole organizes a `cutting-out' procedure whereby K's behaviour is presented as making sense neither to her friends nor to the reader of the text. The procedure involves showing for each instance of her behaviour as well as for the collection as a whole that K's behaviour is not properly provided for by relevant social rules or definitions of the situation. To be recognizable as 'mentally ill type' behaviour examples of K's actions must be constituted as anomalies rather than as deviations from a norm or rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information about the book "Report of the International Study Group of the World Federation of Mental Health," vol. 2, "Mental Health and Contemporary Thought," and vol. 3, "Mental Health in the Service of the Community," edited by Kenneth Soddy and Robert H. Ahrenfeldt. In June 1961 the World Federation of Mental Health assembled a study group of twenty-four experts for an extended period of extempore discussion. The participants prepared working papers in advance of the meeting and tape recordings were made of the discussions. Using these materials two members of the Study Group have produced a three-volume report of the proceedings. In his Preface the Chairman of the Study Group seeks to anticipate criticisms from the natural science purists of such an unsystematic, unorthodox approach to problem solving. In vol. 2, social, demographic, diplomatic and military problems get some decidedly amateurish handling. About ninety pages of introduction and bibliography are common to all three volumes.