Thanks for the suggestions, I'm also interested in books not strictly related to psychodynamics but also other sociological fields that are related (enjoyed Fanon, Goffman, Sapir etc). Haven't read any Jung yet either so any of his works/works similar to him I would also be interested in reading.
Now you're talking
Recovery from Schizophrenia: Schizophrenia and Political Economy by Richard Warner is a great text looking at the political economy of mental illness, and tries to explore why the prognosis for schizophrenia is worse in developed countries than in developing countries.
I don't know what Goffman you have read but in addition to the standard
Asylums and
Stigma,
Behavior in Public Places and
The presentation of self in everyday life are pretty interesting
Being Mentally Ill by Thomas Scheff might be worth a look for an overview of labeling theory. He updated it, and once his thesis was destroyed instead of claiming mental illness was caused by labeling deviant behavior, explores the social implications for doing so
Mental Health and The Built Environment: More Than Bricks and Mortar? by David Halpern (which is apparently being updated, it has been almost 20 years) tackles the neglected topic of environmental influences on mental health.
Steps to an ecology of mind by Gregory Bateson is a collection of writings that explore the confluence of social anthropology, language, psychiatry. It's not the most riveting read but it's a very important and often overlooked text in the social sciences approaches to mental illness. Because Bateson promoted the double bind hypothesis of schizophrenia, he fell from grace, but he was a genius and while double binds don't cause schizophrenia they are very distressing nonetheless.
Lots of Arthur Kleinman texts are highly recommended including
Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, and of course
The Illness Narratives.
Of Two Minds by T.M. Lurhmann is a flawed by brilliantly written ethnography of psychiatry and psychiatry residency that explores the tension between psychodynamic and biological approaches to mind and mental disorder in the 1990s, situated in the era of managed care.
Law, Liberty and Psychiatry is Thomas Szas's most important text. His most famous is
The Myth of Mental Illness, (I wouldn't bother reading the book, he summarized his argument in a paper in American Psychologist in 1960 which you can read). Szasz is often criticized and denounced as irrelevant, but his concerns about individual responsibility, the use of coercion in psychiatry, and the growing therapeutic state are as relevant now as they were when he first articulated them.
The Politics of Experience is R.D. Laing's best work, where he explores madness as a sane response to an insane world. It is beautifully written and not very long.
Critical Psychiatry edited by David Ingelby is a series of essays published in 1980 that, following the decline of "antipsychiatry" aimed to suggest a new blueprint for psychiatry that is essentially a curious meld of Habermas' critical theory and psychoanalysis (hence the term "critical psychiatry").
Making Us Crazy by Kirk and Kutchins is a critique of the development of the DSM (mainly DSM-III) highlighting the arbitrariness of psychiatric diagnoses and the social implications of psychiatric diagnoses
Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters is a brilliant critique of the colonization of the psyche and the exportation of Western models of distress to countries/cultures where they don't apply an aren't welcome.
Madness and Civilization is the classic Foucault text, although
A History of Madness has now been translated in english for a number of years. Foucault's history is somewhat revisionist (aren't they all) and he doesn't let the facts get in the way of his arguments, but as eloquent and descriptive as his prose is, who can blame him?
I think that's more than enough to go on
