testingflink

This post has been written by Dariusz Galasiński, who is  Professor  at the University of Wolverhampton and Visiting Professor  at the Uniwersytet SPWS in Warsaw.  He is a linguist interested in psychiatry and psychology and their discourses. He blogs  here .  In this post, he presents his new  book on discursive constructions of the suicide process. My book is founded on a contradiction. Suicide and masculinity do not and cannot sit together easily. Suicide is stigmatised, and people who killed themselves are often thought to be weak and cowardly. Masculinity is anything but this. Its dominant model constructs men as strong ‘masters of the universe’. My book explores a number of resulting paradoxes. 1. The first paradox has to do with constructions of suicide. Even though suicide is constructed as a rational gift, it is not spoken of directly. The positive gift is outside discourse. For as the notes construct men as 'defenders' of the family (to whic...

On 15th October the Institute for Mental Health  (IMH) had its Inaugural Forum at Hornton Grange at the University of Birmingham. The event was live-tweeted by the Mental Elf and the IMH. The whole project PERFECT team attended the Forum and this report comes from their collective notes. In the morning session, Eoin Killackey (Orygen) and Paul Burstow (IMH) started the day with two fascinating talks on youth mental health. Killackey gave a very international talk, analysing a variety of interventions and forms of support available for young people across the world, reflecting on the many lessons those who wish to improve the UK youth mental health system can learn from these programs.  Two particularly interesting focal points were on how to improve the transition from youth to adult services, and how to better separate services on the basis of demographic and developmental evidence about the prevalence and nature of youth mental health difficulties.  Burstow spoke of ...