Books like Black Women's Mental Health by Stephanie Y. Evans

A powerful anthology of essays by Audre Lorde that traces her intellectual evolution, highlights her advocacy for minority women writers, and examines the intersections of sex, race, and class.

An autobiographical account of a Black woman’s battle with bulimia, exploring cultural barriers, self‑esteem struggles, and the scarcity of race‑sensitive eating‑disorder treatment.

Modern psychiatry is dominated by a biological medical understanding of mental disorder. But should we accept the conception of women this approach enshrines? Is it useful in dealing with mental distress or does it in fact act against women's interests? Denise Russell shows how the 'scientific' approach of contemporary psychiatry causes problems for women and develops an alternative perspective on mental distress. Women, Madness and Medicine looks at the roots of modern psychiatry, its theoretical approach to women, and what shifting trends in diagnosis tell us about its social underpinning. Arguing at both an epistemological and empirical level, Russell challenges the biological base of conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, premenstrual syndrome, anorexia and bulimia and female criminality. The work of women writers such as Phyllis Chesler, Luce Irigaray, Virginia Woolf and Janet Frame is examined in order to develop an alternative way of looking at problems of mental distress in women. This new approach attempts to dissolve the sanity/madness distinction using notions of oppression and repression and focusing on relations rather than individuals. This book will be of interest to undergraduates and graduates in women's studies, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy and sociology.