
Thomas Szasz (1960) suggested that the myth of 'mental illness' functions to 'render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflict in human relations'. The medicalization of distress enables the mental health professions to manage the human suffering that they are confronted with & also the suspicion that there is little that they can do to help. But the medicalization of misery & madness renders people unable to comprehend their experiences in ordinary meaningful terms. In this collection we restore to everyday discourse a way of understanding distress that unlike contemporary psychiatry & psychology recognises & respects the essential humanness of the human condition. De-medicalizing Misery is a shorthand term for this project. The book resists the psychiatrization & psychologization of human experience & seeks to place what are essentially moral & political
- not medical
- matters back at the centre of our understanding of human suffering.