In this wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between mental distress and social constructionism, eminent cross-disciplinary scholars rework modernist assumptions about the phenomenology of mental dysfunction. The authors address how specific cultural, economic and historical forces converge in contemporary psychiatry and psychology, how new syndromes, subjectivities and identities are being constructed and deconstructed in technological, culturally mediated and hyper-reflexive contexts, and what new critiques and understandings of `pathology' seem viable, given these still emerging scenarios.