This book provides a comprehensive analysis of women's experiences within mental health services, demonstrating the need for a radical paradigm shift in how women's distress and experiences are understood. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on coercive mental health treatment, including interviews, participatory action research, arts-based research, and public sociology, the book centres the knowledge, skills, and creativity of psychiatrised women.

Informed by intersectional feminism and critical mental health theory, the book explores the interlocking oppressions of psychiatric harm and patriarchal power, alongside women's survivorship and resistances. Areas covered include the pathologisation of women's emotions within mental health services, violence and deprivations in involuntary treatment, the surveillance of mothering, and social exclusions arising from psychiatric diagnoses. 

The book highlights the ability of collective and creative research processes to move beyond the task of documenting psychiatric harm, towards imagining rich alternatives to biomedical, therapeutic, and carceral practices in mental health.

This article reports on a qualitative study that explored women’s experiences of compulsory mental health treatment in Australia. In-depth interviews revealed substantial gendered harms experienced by women within involuntary mental health treatment settings. Themes identified were: involuntary treatment replicates the dynamics and tactics of gendered violence; treatment involves profound deprivation and losses, with potential implications across the lifecourse; mental health services disrupt and undermine mothering; and recovery is found outside of coercive mental health systems. The study reveals the heightened harms experienced by women within involuntary mental health contexts, as well as women’s strategic resistances to psychiatric oppression.

This article highlights the value of coming to more nuanced understandings of our roles as survivor and non-survivor researchers in mental health research.

We outline the pressures that may be experienced by survivor researchers, for example, the hazards that may accompany the public disclosure of lived experience, and expectations to perform a sanitised version of 'recovery'.

We explore opportunities to build collective understandings and actions in order to challenge psychiatric oppression.

Monique Moat reviews our exhibition, Unscheduled, for Women With Disabilities Australia, May 8th 2023.

During May 2023 in Sydney, Australia, we hosted an original art exhibition showcasing the creative contributions of women with experiences of involuntary mental health treatment. People who attended were invited to consider what changes are needed to better understand and respond to crisis, distress, and difference. The aim was to make space for transformative knowledges and to invite individual and collective actions.

A digital download of the artworks is available on this website under “Community Learning”.