Critical Approaches to Health
About the Book Series
The Routledge Critical Approaches to Health series aims to present critical, inter-disciplinary books around psychological, social and cultural issues related to health. Each volume in the series provides a critical approach to a particular issue or important topic, and is of interest and relevance to students and practitioners across the social sciences. The series is produced in association with the International Society of Critical Health Psychology (ISCHP).
Health Anxiety and the Quest for Safety: Interdisciplinary and Critical Perspectives
1st Edition
By Márta Csabai
December 12, 2025
Health Anxiety and the Quest for Safety critically examines how psychological and socio-cultural processes influence anxiety and safety-seeking behaviour concerning perceived health risks in globalised information societies. It provides insights into how people respond to uncertainty and perceived ...
Critical Health and Learning Disabilities: An Exploration of Erasure and Social Murder
1st Edition
By Sara Ryan
August 08, 2025
This empirically grounded book presents a critical, interdisciplinary perspective on social and cultural issues related to the health and wellbeing of people with learning disabilities. Through an exploration of healthcare, love and intimacy, pregnancy and childbirth, housing, employment and food ...
Critical Approaches to Death, Dying and Bereavement
1st Edition
By Erica Borgstrom, Renske Visser
November 07, 2024
This book is the first of its kind to examine key topics in death, dying, and bereavement through a critical lens, highlighting how the understanding and experience of death can vary considerably, based on social, cultural, historical, political, and medical contexts. It looks at the complex ways ...
Making Mental Health: A Critical History
1st Edition
By Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen
August 07, 2024
Making Mental Health: A Critical History historicises mental health by examining the concept from the ‘madness’ of the late nineteenth century to the changing ideas about its contemporary concerns and status. It argues that a critical approach to the history of psychiatry and mental health shows ...
Rethinking Global Health: Frameworks of Power
1st Edition
By Rochelle A. Burgess
September 29, 2023
This book reflects and analyses the working of power in the field of global health– and what this goes on to produce. In so doing, Rethinking Global Health asks the pivotal questions of, ‘who is global health for’ and ‘what is it that limits our ability to build responses that meet people where ...
Medical Humanities: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics
1st Edition
By Alan Bleakley
September 22, 2023
This ground-breaking book sets out a fresh vision for a future medical education by providing a radical reconceptualisation of the purposes of medical humanities through a lens of critical health psychology and liberatory pedagogy. The medical humanities are conceived as translational media through...
Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives
1st Edition
By Heide Castañeda
July 27, 2022
Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives offers a radical rethinking of the field by unsettling conventional ideas of mobility and borders to highlight the ways in which they produce health inequalities. Covering a wide range of topics, the text provides insight through a critical lens, and ...
Rethinking Obesity: Critical Perspectives in Crisis Times
1st Edition
By Lee F. Monaghan, Emma Rich, Andrea E. Bombak
May 17, 2022
Theoretically informed and empirically grounded, Rethinking Obesity invites readers to reconsider the medical and public health framing of population weight (gain) as a massive global problem, epidemic or crisis. Attentive to social values, scientific uncertainty and possible harms, the book ...
Selling Immunity Self, Culture and Economy in Healthcare and Medicine
1st Edition
By Mark Davis
March 01, 2022
Selling Immunity Self, Culture and Economy in Healthcare and Medicine provides a groundbreaking study of the ways in which immunity shapes life. Through its up-to-date discussion of immunity cultures, alongside detailed real-world examples, the book demonstrates how immunity is enmeshed in ...
Embodied Trauma and Healing: Critical Conversations on the Concept of Health
1st Edition
By Anna Westin
February 25, 2022
What if philosophy could solve the psychological puzzle of trauma? Embodied Trauma and Healing argues just that, suggesting that one might be needed in order to understand the other. The book demonstrates how the body-mind problem that haunted Descartes was addressed by phenomenologists, whilst ...
Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Containing and Expanding Therapeutic Possibilities
1st Edition
By Kevin Dew
April 20, 2021
Complementary and Alternative Medicine is a sociological investigation of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in contemporary society, and an exploration of the forces throughout the globe, across different institutions, and within different therapeutic spaces, that constrain or foster ...
Critical Ethnographic Perspectives on Medical Travel
1st Edition
By Cecilia Vindrola Padros
October 15, 2019
By taking an ethnographic approach to medical travel, this important book uses critical perspectives to understand inequalities in healthcare access and delivery, including gender, class and ethnicity, and explore how these are negotiated. In this key text Vindrola- Padros presents a comprehensive ...