Module Directory

Why do we treat mental health disorders? Is it purely to reduce distress, or is something more complicated going on? Can treatments for mental ill health be interpreted as enforcement or oppression? Alternatively, what happens when therapy is only available to those with socio-economic privilege? Through a critical interrogation of the idea of the ‘cure’, this module poses a question concerning the treatment of mental health disorders and models of recovery.

The module will explore the spaces in which treatment has been situated, ranging from the asylum to the clinic, to the community. Students will be encouraged to think about the political, ethical, and economic implications of different models of ‘cure’ including psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Students will gain an understanding of the history of mental health discourse from the 19^th century to the present day, as well as thinking about the current crisis in mental health provision in the UK.

The aims of this module are:

• To critically engage with concepts of ‘cure’ and being ‘cured’, in therapeutic and non-clinical settings.


• To identify that models of recovery are historically, socially, and culturally situated.


• To question the ethical, political, and economic implications of ‘cure’ in relation to mental health.


• To survey a range of therapeutic and psychological modalities of ‘cure’, including psychoanalysis.


• To consider how psychotherapeutic practice is framed by time and space.


• To explore the spaces in which illness and recovery have been situated and told, including the asylum, the clinic, art and writing.

By the end of the module, students will be expected to:

1. Demonstrate critical understanding by discussing discourses surrounding recovery, the ‘cure’, and being ‘cured’.


2. Demonstrate a critical engagement with some of the contexts in which models of ‘cure’ have emerged.


3. Demonstrate knowledge and understanding about what psychotherapy has to say about the possibility of being ‘cured’, and how this compares to other clinical and non-clinical accounts.


4. Demonstrate ability to apply concepts by engaging with narratives of illness and recovery, including non-scholarly accounts.


5. Critically evaluate varying models of cure/being cured.


6. Demonstrate an ability to make theoretical connections across the module.


7. Demonstrate knowledge and understanding concerning how narrative accounts produce and construct ideas of cure/being cured.

Indicative syllabus

Histories

• From madness to mental health


• Spaces of cure – the asylum, the clinic, the community


• Psychoanalysis

Cures

• The search for “ordinary unhappiness” – the psychotherapeutic ‘cure’


• Social structures, psychiatry and the law


• ‘Anti-psychiatry’ and recovery


• 21^st-Century ‘wellbeing’

Narratives: Creativity, illness, and transformation

This module will be delivered via:

• Ten 1-hour interactive lectures, to be available to students on Listen Again.
• Ten 1-hour seminars – made up, as appropriate, of group activities, group discussion, debates, written activities.

Students are expected to undertake the reading before classes and be prepared to engage in discussion.

Students are expected to prepare and deliver one ten-minute presentation at the end of the module.