Mirrors of Madness: Patrolling the Psychic Border (Social Problems and Social Issues (Walter Paperback))
“Mirrors of Madnessmakes good reading. Luske vividly illustrates how fuzzy the border is between the normal and the insane by juxtaposing interviews with residents and staff and then challenging the reader to make a diagnosis… [T]his work provides a wise note of caution to the current enthusiasm for sociobiomedical research on mental disorder.”—Suzanne T. Ortega,Social Forces“Staff in a psychiatric hospital alter their own behaviors to protect against the danger of considering themselves mentally ill or providing grounds for others to so frame them. That is Bruce Luske’s thesis, and he provides persuasive evidence from his eighteen-month participant-observer study to support it. The phenomenon he dubs “reverse role modeling” is an important contribution to the Goffmanian literature on psychiatric institutions, as is Luske’s specification of the dualistic accounts staff use to confirm the otherness of patients.”—Barry Glassner,Contemporary Sociology