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Discourses on Children’s Mental Health: A Critical Review

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The Palgrave Handbook of Child Mental Health

Abstract

A minor furore was set off back in the early 1960s when amateur historian Philips Ariés (1962) reported that childhood was discovered in the 17th century. The furore partly came from Ariés’ claim that childhood was relatively a recent notion formerly indistinguishable from adulthood. It took until 1842, for example, for the British parliament to enact the Mines Act, forbidding children under 10 to work in coal mines. At about the same time, Charles Dickens’ stories of children (e.g. Oliver Twist, 1838) on the streets of London sensitised readers to the plight of children in poverty. For Ariés, the bigger hermeneutic story was how our notions of childhood changed across historical and cultural contexts. Similar things could be said about children’s mental health.

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Recommended reading

  • • Conrad, P. (2007). The medicalization of society: On the transformation of human conditions into treatable disorders. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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  • • Frances, A. (2013). Saving normal: An insider’s revolt against out-of-controlpsychiatric diagnosis, DSM-5, bigpharma, and the medicalization of ordinary life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

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  • • Hutchby, I. (2007). The discourse of child counselling. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

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Authors
  1. Tom Strong
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  2. Monica Sesma-Vazquez
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leicester, UK

    Michelle O’Reilly (Senior Lecturer) (Senior Lecturer)

  2. Indiana University, USA

    Jessica Nina Lester (Assistant Professor) (Assistant Professor)

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© 2015 Tom Strong and Monica Sesma-Vazquez

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Strong, T., Sesma-Vazquez, M. (2015). Discourses on Children’s Mental Health: A Critical Review. In: O’Reilly, M., Lester, J.N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Child Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428318_6

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