Mental Health User Narratives : New Perspectives on Illness and Recovery

Following extensive research in the UK, Bruce Cohen allows mental health users to tell their own stories (or 'narratives') of illness and recovery. Institutional and home treatment care is covered alongside controversial self-coping techniques such as drug-taking, spiritualism, alternative healing, sleep and watching television.

In Mental Health User Narratives, sociologist Bruce Cohen argues that the real experts on ''mental illness'' - namely, service users - continue to be marginalised and silenced by health professionals. This book, now in paperback, attempts to redress that issue. Through extensive research with users in the UK, the author details user ''narratives'' (or stories) which give insight into areas such as spiritualism, self-coping, self-recovery, alternative treatments, positive effects of illness, and future life paths. The research demonstrates a need to widen the therapeutic mind to include the mundane and everyday as additional foci for treatment. This book remains a rare example which allows mental health users to speak to the professional community that offers to treat them, and as such it is an important resource for mental health professionals as well as groups of users and carers. This paperback edition includes a new introduction from the author and a Foreword by the eminent social critic Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.