Critical Mental Health in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

This interdisciplinary volume examines the social production of mental health and illness in Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand). It draws together cutting-edge critical mental health scholarship from the region, to interrogate how personal, community, institutional and mediated relations, make and remake experiences of ‘mental health.’

In the wake of the widespread insertion of psy-considerations into everyday lives, here contributors demonstrate how the relations between communities, practices, professionals and institutions often replicate long-standing histories of discrimination and violence motivated by psychiatric classification, even as the psy-disciplines move into supposedly more transformational domains: digital technology, schooling, human resources, and social media, for example.

The book’s chapters reflect the current diversity within academic studies of mental health and illness in Australia and Aotearoa. This includes a wide range of case studies from war trauma in the Australian military and pornography addiction, to the depathologisation of trans health and peer workers in mental health services.

Critical Mental Health in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand offers unique insights particular to the region, to students and scholars of critical psychology, history, sociology, medical humanities, and education.

Natalie Ann Hendry is an educator and researcher who has worked and collaborated across community, secondary and hospital-based education sectors since 2003. Forever curious about the messy relationships between health, digital media and education, Natalie’s research engages with media studies, cultural studies and sociological theories and uses digital ethnography, creative methods and policy analysis approaches. She currently is a Senior Lecturer in Youth Wellbeing in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, where she teaches social research methodology and social and critical approaches to wellbeing in schools. 

Effie Karageorgos is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle (UON), Australia. Her research focuses on the social history of war through the study of protest, violence, war, gender and psychiatry. She is an Editor of Health and History, the official journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine and has served as co-convenor of the UON Future of Madness Network. She coordinates the Social Production of Mental Health interdisciplinary seminar series with Natalie Ann Hendry.