Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection disengages from the common forms of discussion about violence related to mental health service users and survivors which position those users or survivors as more likely to enact violence or become victims of violence. Instead, this book seeks to broaden understandings of violence manifest in the lives of mental health service users/survivors, ‘push’ current considerations to explore the impacts of systems and institutions that manage ‘abnormality’, and to create and foster space to explore the role of our own communities in justice and accountability dialogues.

This critical collection constitutes an integral contribution to critical scholarship on violence and mental illness by addressing a gap in the existing literature by broadening the “violence lens,” and inviting an interdisciplinary conversation that is not narrowly biomedical and neuro-scientific.

Andrea Daley is Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Renison University College (affiliated with University of Waterloo).

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Lucy Costa is Deputy Executive Director of The Empowerment Council, an independent service user rights-based organization in Toronto, Canada.

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Peter Beresford is a professor of citizen participation at the University of Essex, emeritus professor of social policy at Brunel University London, and co-chair of Shaping Our Lives, a UK organization and network of user-led groups, service users, and people with disabilities.

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