'This challenging and engaging book will inform and, on occasion, astonish those with an interest in mental health problems and service delivery. This book is a tour de force and should be read by everyone with an interest in mental health care and by all who recognise their democratic responsibility to ensure that those in need are assisted and neither deceived nor abused.'
Peter Nolan, Professor of Mental Health Nursing (Emeritus), Staffordshire University

‘…an accomplished, lucid, important account, well contextualised and full of fascinating and often quite moving (and horrific) detail. Dickinson is to be congratulated on a very fine piece of scholarship that deserves a wide readership.'
Brian Lewis, Professor of History, McGill University, Canada

'The book provides a beautifully balanced argument to make visible the brutal ""treatments"" and care practices people were subjected to in the name of biomedicine and psychiatry. The text gives voice to the courage of queer people and practitioners to resist these norms [and] succeeds in giving an account of the advance towards gender and sexual plurality.'
Laetitia Zeeman, Senior Lecturer in Mental Health, University of Brighton