Winner of the 2009 Feminist & Women's Studies Association (UK & Ireland) Book Award

Many women find mothering a shocking experience in terms of the extremity of feelings it provokes, and the profound changes it seems to prompt in identity, relationship and sense of self. However, although motherhood can catapult us into a state of internal disarray, it can also provide us with a unique chance to make ourselves anew. How then do we understand this radical potential for transformation within maternal experience? In Maternal Encounters, Lisa...

The psychology of women's health is an area traditionally controlled by male-orientated scientists, psychologists and doctors. Women by definition have been unquestioningly seen and treated as deviant from the male norm. This model has been challenged by feminist historians and sociologists but not by psychologists who seem to have implicitly accepted the medical model and emphasised the pathology in women's behaviour and emotions. In this book women's views and their experience of their own health and health care are taken seriously and analysed within a psychological and a feminist angle.

Nominated for the 2012 Distinguished Publication Award of the Association for Women in Psychology

Why are women more likely to be positioned or diagnosed as mad than men?

If madness is a social construction, a gendered label, as many feminist critics would argue, how can we understand and explain women's prolonged misery and distress? In turn, can we prevent or treat women's distress, in a non-pathologising women centred way? The Madness of Women addresses these questions through a rigorous exploration of the myths and realities of women's...