Conservatorship is about the dysfunctional conservatorship system that has evolved in the wake of deinstitutionalization – a “system” that yields capricious consequences. In his deep accounting of the pathologies of this system, Barnard achieves a rare feat in the controversy over coerced treatment. Rather than succumb to polemical logic of the debate over forced treatment, he offers a measured analysis that cuts to the core of the mess we are in. In doing so, he reveals the kind of suffering our mental health systems – or lack thereof – create.
Winner, 2024 Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award, Medical Sociology Section, American Sociological Association
Is involuntary psychiatric treatment the solution to the intertwined crises of untreated mental illness, homelessness, and addiction? In recent years, politicians and advocates have sought to expand the use of conservatorships, a legal tool used to force someone deemed "gravely disabled," or unable to meet their needs for food, clothing, or shelter as a result of mental illness, to take medication and be placed in a locked facility. At the same time, civil liberties and disability rights groups have seized on cases like that of Britney Spears…
This book compares the "haves" and "have nots" in the world of mental health treatments. Gong has revealed our society’s bifurcated approach to serious mental illness – one system for the rich that works to modify the soul, another for the poor that seeks merely to minimize public nuisances. And ironically and counterintuitively, he shows that poor individuals living with serious mental illness are granted greater freedom.
Sociologist Neil Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between.
In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics, sociologist Neil Gong traces the divide between the haves and have-nots in the psychiatric treatment systems that shape the life trajectories of people living with serious mental illness. In the decades since the United States closed its mental hospitals in favor of non-institutional treatment,…
Winner, 2024 Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Law Section, American Sociological Association
Winner, 2024 Outstanding Book Award, Division of Policing, American Society of Criminology
Policing is violent. And its violence is not distributed equally: stark racial disparities persist despite decades of efforts to address them. Amid public outcry and an ongoing crisis of police legitimacy, there is pressing need to understand not only how police perceive and use violence but also why.
With unprecedented access to three police departments and drawing on more than 100 interviews and 1,000 hours on patrol, The Danger Imperative provides vital insight into how police…
Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping book tells us, the history of American psychiatry is really a history of ignorance.
On the Heels of Ignorance begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to understand mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no antipsychiatry screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving, with sometimes tragic results.
