Psychiatric Oppression in Women's Lives

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of women's experiences within mental health services, demonstrating the need for a radical paradigm shift in how women's distress and experiences are understood. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on coercive mental health treatment, including interviews, participatory action research, arts-based research, and public sociology, the book centres the knowledge, skills, and creativity of psychiatrised women.

Informed by intersectional feminism and critical mental health theory, the book explores the interlocking oppressions of psychiatric harm and patriarchal power, alongside women's survivorship and resistances. Areas covered include the pathologisation of women's emotions within mental health services, violence and deprivations in involuntary treatment, the surveillance of mothering, and social exclusions arising from psychiatric diagnoses. 

The book highlights the ability of collective and creative research processes to move beyond the task of documenting psychiatric harm, towards imagining rich alternatives to biomedical, therapeutic, and carceral practices in mental health. It offers a critique of the notions of ‘benevolence’ and ‘expertise’, which are commonly used to justify psychiatric coercion. It will appeal to students and scholars working across the fields of critical mental health, sociology, social work, psychiatry, mental health nursing and gender studies.

Emma Tseris is senior lecturer in Social Work and Policy Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, researching feminist and critical mental health theory. She is the author of Trauma, Women's Mental Health and Social Justice: Pitfalls and Possibilities (2019) and co-author of Using Social Research for Social Justice (2023).

Scarlett Franks is a survivor researcher from the University of Sydney, Australia, who also serves on the Survivor College of the National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse, the board of directors of the Grace Tame Foundation, and the Advisory Panel of the NSW Office of the Anti-Slavery Commissioner. 

Eva Bright Hart is a feminist survivor researcher from the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a senior social worker and public health professional from a rural area. Eva is also known as a mother, teacher, gardener, cook, author, activist and artist. As a survivor of psychiatric and gendered violence Eva uses a protective pseudonym so she can contribute without the fear of further discrimination, disablement and involuntary psychiatric treatment for herself and her family. Eva means "living one".