The Role of Trust in Mental Health: Vulnerability and Trust-Building in Theory and Practice

This book offers a comprehensive examination of trust and its relationship with mental illness and wellbeing.

Engaging with a broad range of mental health research, theory, and practice through various transdisciplinary theoretical models of trust, this book highlights the social and family contexts surrounding the making and breaking of trust and mental health. It examines various sociological conceptual and theoretical frameworks of risk and trust while also engaging with evolutionary perspectives on the human need for cooperation and trust. The author describes how, in a world of constant connectivity, the drawing of boundaries assigns some people as strangers, using stigma as a form of power. The book concludes by considering the future of mental health and where trust-building may be possible. Each chapter is interspersed with observations and insights from the author’s personal research covering many populations, communities and issues over several decades.

Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary literature, the book will be of interest to mental health practitioners, researchers, and scholars interested in the psychosocial aspects of mental illness and stigma.

Gerard Leavey has researched and published widely on mental illness and health inequalities. His work spans health service and epidemiological studies on ethnicity, suicide and severe mental illness and qualitative investigations of religious leaders, and schoolteachers, and their role in the recognition and management of mental illness.