Weekend reading: SuziQ, psychosis, and werewolves

Mental health headlines in Australia over the last few weeks have highlighted various governments’ pledges to fix the mental health system.  The Mandarin brings it all together here.  (This article is also a good example of the use of the clunky term ‘people with lived experience’ (PWLE) – see Rosella Room‘s earlier post on terminology here).

Elsewhere, Julaine Allan, a senior research fellow at Charles Sturt University, reports for The Conversation on the uses, abuses and dangers of the popular antipsychotic drug quetiapine, also known as SuziQ.

JSTOR has a piece on society’s longstanding tendency to moralise and criminalise mental disorders.  Citing medieval views that werewolves were “a delusion produced by the devil” as a good example of this, KC Mead-Brewer laments that “the idea that mental illness is either a product of curses, demonic activity, or weak moral character remains disturbingly popular today.”

Rosella Room readers may also be interested in The Smithsonian‘s musings on moves to enable British GPs to engage in ‘social prescription‘ – prescribing cultural activities to complement medical treatment.  Prescribed treatment might include, for example, gardening, museum visits, music lessons (for stroke survivors), dance (for psychosis), music playlists (for Alzheimer’s) or singing (for lung patients).  It sounds good at first blush.  But is this the medicalisation of wellbeing?   We’ll review social prescription in more detail in a later post.  

Photo by Jess Watters on Unsplash