Closing Asylums for the Mentally Ill: Social Consequences
Special Issue of Health Sociology Review
Volume 14 Issue 3 December 2005
104 pages ISBN 978-0-9757422-1-1
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, 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.
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