Health or The Age of Melancholy

Health

Author: Mildred Blaxter

This book provides a comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the key debates surrounding the concept of health today. It discusses how health is defined, constructed, experienced and acted out in contemporary developed societies, drawing on a range of empirical data and theoretical approaches from the USA, Britain, France, Germany and other countries. Throughout the text special emphasis is given to the lay perspective to show how people themselves think about and experience health and illness. The author guides students through all the relevant conceptual models of the relationship of health to the structure of society, from inequality in health to the ideas of social capital, the risk society and theories of evolutionary biology. The book concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of the impact of new knowledge and technology on our understanding of health and illness in the contemporary world. Health will be an invaluable textbook for students of medicine and other health professions, as well as those studying sociology, health sciences and health promotion.

Table of Contents:

1	How is health defined?	4
2	How is health constructed?	26
3	How is health experienced?	45
4	How is health enacted?	71
5	How is health related to social systems?	91
6	Where is the concept of health going in the contemporary world?	122

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The Age of Melancholy: Major Depression and Its Social Origins

Author: Dan G Blazer

Depression has become the most frequently diagnosed chronic mental illness, and is a disability encountered almost daily by mental health professionals of all trades. Major depression is a medical disease, which some would argue has reached epidemic proportions in contemporary society, and it affects our bodies and brains just like any other disease. The Age of Melancholy asks why the incidence of depression has been on such an increase in the last 50 years, if our basic biology hasn't changed as rapidly. To find answers, Dr. Blazer looks at the social forces, cultural and environmental upheavals, and other external, group factors that have undergone significant change. In so doing, the author revives the tenets of social psychiatry, the process of looking at social trends, environmental factors, and correlations among groups in efforts to understand psychiatric disorders.

The biomedical model of psychiatry that has dominated the field for the past half-century has faced minimal scrutiny, due inpart to the apparent advances made in the treatment of mental health issues during that time. But, Dr. Blazer eloquently argues, there is still room for a "new" social psychiatry to complement and complete the model, and he points to two concurrent trends for support: during the same 50-year period that saw the "death of social psychiatry," the rate of occurrence and increasing medicalization of depression as a secluded individual's issue have brought us to the Prozac era. In making the case for the connection of these two trends (both the products themselves of larger social and cultural movements), the author proposes a return of a new, more mature social psychiatry, tocomplete - not replace - the biomedical and clinical research models in place today.

This book is eminently readable, and should appeal to a broader audience than the psychiatrists, clinicians, and researchers who will make up the primary audience. While replete with the standard mental health references, sound research, andauthored by a recognized and respected professional, the ease of language and range of examples make this text accessible to a lay reader. This book should have cross-over appeal in sociology as well as social work and psychology.