The problem of mental deficiency

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Paul Close

The State and Caring is a collection of essays especially prepared by an international team of writers on issues concerned with the part played by the state in the process of caring in modern societies. The writers focus on five societies - Britain, Japan, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. But they deliberately address aspects of the state and caring in these particular societies so as to develop arguments and arrive at conclusions of relevance to modern societies in general. The writers come from different scholarly disciplines and accordingly employ a range of perspectives on the state and caring. Nonetheless, all the writers adopt approaches to their topics which lie firmly within the 'critical school' of social thought and comment. The writers scrutinise sceptically the outcomes, interests and motives associated with state care, favouring the view that the state not only inadequately but also detrimentally affects people's welfare. An overall message of the book is that we can understand and improve the state's involvement in care only by recognising how this involvement ties in with a further social process - that of social control. At the same time, the book carries the optimistic message that precisely because state care also entails the everyday experience of state control, the state's involvement in caring becomes a crucial source of progressive social change in modern societies.

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Linda Bauld ... [et al

"This title was first published in 2000: Caring for Older People provides a unique insight into the world of community care in the 1990's. It presents findings from a national study of social care from the perspectives of older service users, their carers and care managers. Descriptive findings from this longitudinal study - conducted by the PSSRU from 1994 and funded by the Department of Health - are set in the context of the history of community care and developments since the passage of the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act. The study's findings highlight important challenges for policy and practice development in the new millennium."--Provided by publisher.

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Kay Redfield Jamison

"The best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind now gives us a groundbreaking life of one of the major American poets of the twentieth century that is at the same time a fascinating study of the relationship between manic-depressive (bipolar) illness, creative genius, and character. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell (1917-1977) put his manic-depressive illness into the public domain. Now Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison brings her expertise to bear on his story, illuminating the relationship between bipolar illness and creativity, and examining how Lowell's illness and the treatment he received came to bear on his work. His New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets, vivid presence as a teacher and writer refusing to give up in the face of mental illness--Jamison gives us Lowell's life through a lens that focuses our understanding of the poet's intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell's medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and was the first biographer to speak to his daughter. With this new material and a psychologist's deep insight, Jamison delivers a bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was--both despite and because of mental illness--a passionate, original observer of the human condition"--

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Linda Hartley

Looking at the ground-breaking work of the London based Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy, this book brings together Chiron trainers and therapists, describing how their approach has enabled cutting-edge thinking.