A Straight Talking Introduction to Emotional Wellbeing

‘This book represents a mission, a historical analysis of the radical challenges in mental health social care to address a truly equitable lived experienced epistemological framework. One that liberates those who have been misdiagnosed, criminalised and endured death. It transcends race, equality and offers the potential for equity from assessment, admission, care plan and discharge, beyond the restraints of a new slavery in the neo-liberal economics of modern mental health care. It empowers black men like me, the victims of a new Drapetomania, to seek clinical parity, to use my values as capital in exchange for a move away from the bio-medical entrapment to a caring mental health system built on the values of liberation and humanity. The book offers a reform beyond principles of care and autonomy. It legislates for a coproduction based on the erosion of professionalised medical dominance, and the service user as the advocate of political and statutory change in mental health care.’ – Colin King, Black survivor research activist and founder of the Whiteness and Race Equality Network. -- ‘Beresford takes us on a journey though the ideas, values and actions of service users, survivors and disabled people, mapping his own steps on the way. He speaks with clarity, never obscuring with academic language the important ideas he discusses. This is a compelling critique and a hopeful vision, proposing ways in which we can address the seemingly intractable problems with how madness and distress are conceived and treated. At a time of crisis in mental health, this book is energising and encouraging.’ – Dr Sarah Carr, independent researcher and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Service User Research Enterprise, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. -- ‘Whether you're a healthcare provider, a researcher or someone who uses services, this book is helpful to anybody who wants to learn more about the many facets of mental health care and treatments. The book demonstrates the value of service users’ voices by including points of view that remind us of the importance of first-person experiential knowledge in contributing to the radical changes needed to improve public policy, law and healthcare itself. The book also takes readers a step further by discussing the exciting theoretical possibilities available through the work of Mad Studies and its role in addressing and moving us all closer to a collective politics of hope and survival.’ – Lucy Costa , Deputy Executive Director, The Empowerment Council. -- 'With incisiveness and depth, Beresford presents a comprehensive picture of the mental ‘help’ system as it currently operates, which is largely to deepen suffering, prejudice and isolation. Interweaving the personal with peer narratives, he offers hope in the liberatory potential of the user/survivor alliances as opposed to individual helplessness and bleakness engendered by mainstream treatments. This is a book that saddens in parts, yet also drives in the meaningfulness of organising together and becoming agents of our own lives and stories, instead of passive consumers within a heartless, indifferent machine that effaces the person and sees them only as a social nuisance to be kept in control. This is a book I recommend to everyone who believes psychiatry has a solution for them and that, sooner or later, they are going to heal using those unending, ever increasing pharmacological prescriptions.' – Prateeksha Sharma, peer psychotherapist and author of Barriers to Recovery from 'Psychosis': A peer investigation of psychiatric subjectivation.