Patrick Bracken is a graduate of the National University of Ireland who did his early medical and psychiatric training in Southern Ireland. In the years 1987-1991 he worked for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in Uganda and subsequently worked for the Medical Foundation in London. His M.D. degree was awarded for research with a rural village in the notorious 'Luwero Triangle' of Uganda. His interest in the psychological effects of violence has continued and he has carried out a number of consultancies for Save The Children in West Africa and most recently with refugees from Bhutan living in Nepal.

Philip Thomas is a writer and Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Citizenship and Community Mental Health, in the School of Health Studies, University of Bradford. Until recently he was consultant psychiatrist with Bradford's Assertive Outreach Team, and had worked as a full time consultant for over 20 years in the NHS, in Manchester, North Wales and Bradford. His academic interests include critical social and cultural psychiatry and philosophy. He is also interested in narrative and the problems of representation in medicine and literature. He has developed alliances with survivors of psychiatry and service users, locally, nationally and internationally. He is well-known for his academic and clinical work on the experience of hearing voices, arguing that these, and other experiences of psychosis, are understandable in the context of the person's life story and current life circumstances.

• Introduction: 'The times they are a-changin'


• Doing their best


• 1: Values, evidence, conflict


• 2: What counts as evidence?


• The miracle drug


• 3: The battle for acceptance: defining the relationship between medicine and the world of madness and distress


• The ring


• 4: Foregrounding contexts: what kinds of understanding are appropriate in the world of mental illness?


• Losing Peter


• 5: Mind, language and meaning


• Beetles


• 6: Ethics before technology - is 'treatment' the best way to think about mental health work?


• 7: Narrative and the ethics of representation


• 8: Meaning and recovery


• 9: Citizenship and the politics of identity


• 10: Are you local? Responding to the challenge of globalisation in mental health


• The veil