In his book “Queer and Trans Madness,” professor Merrick Pilling provides the first comprehensive application of Mad Studies to LGBTQ experiences of mental distress.
Psychiatric charts reflect institutional ideology that reinforces gendered, raced, sexualized, and classed norms, values, and presuppositions, says Merrick Pilling.
A professor of women’s and gender studies in the UWindsor School of Social Work, he provides a critical analysis which reveals how implicit biases operate in day-to-day caregiving in a book that will launch Thursday, March 31.
Dr. Pilling edited Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness in collaboration with social work professor Andrea Daley of the University of Waterloo. It focuses on how gender, sexuality, race, and class structure psychiatry and the implications for mental health care practitioners in social work, psychiatry, nursing, and beyond.
Thursday’s launch event is free and open to the public and will take place on Zoom from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Register online at https://uwaterloo.ca/renison/events/book-launch-interrogating-psychiatric-narratives-madness.
Following on his first book, Pilling has published the monograph Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice, the first comprehensive application of Mad Studies to 2SLGBTQ experiences of mental distress.
Through analyses of inpatient chart documentation from a psychiatric hospital and interviews with those who have experienced distress, he examines what constitutes mental health treatment and its impacts on mad queer and trans people.