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How do mental health professionals link adverse life experiences with the kinds of beliefs and experiences which attract a diagnosis of psychosis and what implications does this have for women with these diagnoses? Drawing on a broadly critical realist framework, we present data from two studies relevant to these questions. First, we analyse the discursive practices engaged in during a staff-only discussion of a female in-patient with a psychosis diagnosis who had been raped some years previously. Staff oriented to the irrationality and factuality of her ostensibly delusional statements about rape and pregnancy in the present and formulated adverse experience as a “stress factor” triggering a manic episode, thereby precluding alternative contextualising interpretations. In a second, interview-based, study, psychiatrists drew on a range of discursive resources which differentiated “psychosis” from other forms of distress, constructed trauma as a stressor which could trigger psychosis because of a genetic predisposition, and constructed medication as the primary intervention whilst trauma was de-emphasised. We discuss the implications of these findings for the kinds of explanations and forms of help offered and suggest ways in which distress might be contextualised as well as possible future directions for feminist research and practice.

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. One of the most important elements to the rise of Henry George to international prominence in the 1880s was his‐successful cultivation of a large Irish‐American following. This was no small accomplishment, given the fact that George was not Irish Catholic, but rather English‐American Protestant. Nonetheless, through his early interest in Ireland's troubles, marriage to Irish Catholic Annie McCloskey Fox, friendship with Patrick Ford and Michael Davitt, activism in the Irish Land League, travels through Ireland during the Land War as a correspondent for the Irish World, and linking the struggle of Irish peasants against economic injustice to a similar struggle of American workers, George developed an enormous Irish‐American following. This relationship accounted for much of the early sales of Progress and Poverty and subsequent lecture opportunities, as well as making him known widely throughout the British Isles. The culmination of this phenomenon was George's sensational run for mayor of New York City in 1886.

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