THE FUTURE OF MENTAL HEALTH READING LIST
The following 100+ books constitute a substantial (though by no means complete) body of literature exploring the issues addressed by the Future of Mental Health Movement: the lack of legitimacy of the DSM and its labeling model, the differences between medication for illness and chemicals with effects, the epidemic of labeling children with “mental disorders,” the globalization of the American psychiatric model, the strengths and weaknesses of psychotherapy, alternative ways of helping individuals with emotional and mental distress, etc.
Your starting place might be [The Future of Mental Health], available at this site.
If you know of a book that you believe ought to be added to this list, please [contact us].
All book descriptions are provided by the publisher, by the book’s author, or are Amazon’s description of the book.
THE FUTURE OF MENTAL HEALTH READING LIST
Barber, Charles. Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0013SSPUU/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb
American doctors dispense approximately 230 million antidepressant prescriptions every year, more than any other class of medication. Charles Barber explores this disturbing phenomenon, examining the ways in which pharmaceutical companies first create the need for a drug and then rush to fill it. Most importantly, he convincingly argues that, without an industry to promote them, non-pharmaceutical approaches are tragically overlooked in favor of an instant cure for all emotional difficulties. Compulsively readable and urgently relevant, Comfortably Numb is an unprecedented account of the impact of psychiatric medications on American culture and on Americans themselves.
Barrett, Louise. Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds
When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations–that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment–not just their brains–to behave intelligently.
Bass, Alison. Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial
Side Effects tells the tale of a gutsy assistant attorney general who, along with an unlikely whistle-blower at an Ivy League university, uncovered evidence of deception behind one of the most successful drug campaigns in history. Paxil was the world’s bestselling antidepressant in 2002. Pediatric prescriptions soared, even though there was no proof that the drug performed any better than sugar pills in treating children and adolescents, and the real risks the drugs posed were withheld from the public.
The New York State Attorney General’s office brought an unprecedented lawsuit against giant manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, for consumer fraud. The successful suit launched a tidal wave of protest that changed the way drugs are tested, sold, and marketed in this country. With meticulous research, Alison Bass shows us the underbelly of the pharmaceutical industry. She lays bare the unhealthy ties between the medical establishment, big pharma, and the FDA—relationships that place vulnerable children and adults at risk every day.
Basset, Thurstine and Theo Stickley. Voices of Experience: Narratives of Mental Health Survivors
Voices of Experience contains a wide range of stories written by mental health survivors. The narratives illustrate how survivors have developed self-management techniques and strategies for living which, together, offer a guide to anybody struggling with 21st century life. Explores a wide variety of mental distress experiences, underpinned by many different explanations and beliefs. Narrative has been central to the recovery approach and this book presents stories of recovery as well as an appraisal of the concept. Challenges simplistic explanations of recovery and offers a critical angle to our understanding of what it means to experience mental health problems. Offers guidance for mental health workers and professionals within the context of current mental health policies in the UK
Bentall, Richard. Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature
Today most of us accept the consensus that madness is a medical condition: an illness, which can be identified, classified and treated with drugs like any other. In this groundbreaking and controversial work Richard Bentall shatters the myths that surround madness. He shows there is no reassuring dividing line between mental health and mental illness. Severe mental disorders can no longer be reduced to brain chemistry, but must be understood psychologically, as part of normal behavior and human nature. Bentall argues that we need a radically new way of thinking about psychosis and its treatment. Could it be that it is a fear of madness, rather than the madness itself, that is our problem?
Bentall, Richard. Doctoring the Mind: Why Psychiatric Treatments Fail
Toward the end of the twentieth century, the solution to mental illness seemed to be found. It lay in biological solutions, focusing on mental illness as a problem of the brain, to be managed or improved through drugs. We entered the “Prozac Age” and believed we had moved far beyond the time of frontal lobotomies to an age of good and successful mental healthcare. Biological psychiatry had triumphed.
Except maybe it hadn’t. Starting with surprising evidence from the World Health Organization that suggests that people recover better from mental illness in a developing country than in the first world, Doctoring the Mind asks the question: how good are our mental healthcare services, really? Richard P. Bentall picks apart the science that underlies our current psychiatric practice. He puts the patient back at the heart of treatment for mental illness, making the case that a good relationship between patients and their doctors is the most important indicator of whether someone will recover.
Boyle, Mary. Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion?
‘This book presents arguments so profound that you (the reader) will never be able to think of “schizophrenia” in the same way; it may even help you stop thinking about it at all.’ – Tony Lavender, Director, Salomans Centre for Applied Social & Psychological Development
‘This is a marvellous piece of scholarship. Boyle’s analysis is relentless, exceedingly informative, and will undoubtedly be disturbing to all that find comfort in fuzzy thinking, conventional wisdom and unexamined evidence.’ – Stuart A. Kirk, Professor and Marjorie Crump Chair, School of Public Policy and Social Research, University of California
Bracken, Patrick and Philip Thomas. Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World
How are we to make sense of madness and psychosis? For most of us the words conjure up images from television and newspapers of seemingly random, meaningless violence. It is something to be feared, something to be left to the experts. But is madness best thought of as a medical condition? Psychiatrists and the drug industry maintain that psychoses are brain disorders amenable to treatment with drugs, but is this actually so? There is no convincing evidence that the brain is disordered in psychosis, yet governments across the world are investing huge sums of money on mental health services that take for granted the idea that psychosis is an illness to be treated with medication.
Although some people who use mental health services find medication helpful, many do not, and resist the idea that their experiences are symptoms of illnesses like schizophrenia. Consequently they are forced into having treatment against their wishes. So, how do we make sense of this situation? Postpsychiatry addresses these questions. It involves an attempt to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions of mental health work, showing how recent developments in philosophy and ethics can help us to clarify some of the dilemmas and conflicts around different understandings of madness.
Breggin, Peter. Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide, and Crime
In Medication Madness, psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin, M.D., describes how people taking psychiatric medication can experience abnormal behavioral reactions, including suicide, violence, emotional breakdowns, and criminal acts. Dr. Breggin explains his concept of “medication spellbinding”: individuals taking psychiatric drugs may have no idea whatsoever that their mental conditions are deteriorating and that their actions are no longer under control. He proves his argument by documenting dozens of cases from his practice and his consultations in legal cases.
Reading like a thriller, the book also examines how the FDA, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical establishment continue to oversell the value of these drugs, and he provides information on how to safely stop taking psychiatric medications. Medication Madness is a compelling and frightening read as well as a cautionary tale about our reliance on medicine to fix what ails us.
Breggin, Peter. Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the “New Psychiatry”
Prozac, Xanax, Halcion, Haldol, Lithium. These psychiatric drugs–and dozens of other short-term “solutions”–are being prescribed by doctors across the country as a quick antidote to depression, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other psychiatric problems. But at what cost?
In this searing, myth-shattering exposé, psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin, M.D., breaks through the hype and false promises surrounding the “New Psychiatry” and shows how dangerous, even potentially brain-damaging, many of its drugs and treatments are. He asserts that: psychiatric drugs are spreading an epidemic of long-term brain damage; mental “illnesses” like schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorder have never been proven to be genetic or even physical in origin, but are under the jurisdiction of medical doctors; millions of schoolchildren, housewives, elderly people, and others are labeled with medical diagnoses and treated with authoritarian interventions, rather than being patiently listened to, understood, and helped.
Caplan, Paula. Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis
The public has a right to know that when they go to a therapist, they are almost certain to be given a psychiatric diagnosis, no matter how mild or normal their problems might be. It is unlikely that they will be told that a diagnosis will be written forever in their chart and that alarming consequences can result solely from having any psychiatric diagnosis. It would be disturbing enough if diagnosis was a thoroughly scientific process, but it is not, and its unscientific nature creates a vacuum into which biases of all kinds can rush.
Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis is the first book ever published about how gender, race, social class, age, physical disability, and sexual orientation affect the classification of human beings into categories of psychiatric diagnosis. It is surprising that this kind of book is not yet on the market, because it is such a hot topic, and the negative consequences of psychiatric diagnosis range from loss of custody of a child to denial of health insurance and employment to removal of one’s right to make decisions about one’s legal affairs.
Caplan, Paula. They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal
How are decisions made about who is normal? As a former consultant to those who construct the “bible of the mental-health professions,” the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), Paula Caplan offers an insider’s look at the process by which decisions about abnormality are made. Cutting through the professional psycho-babble, Caplan clearly assesses the astonishing extent to which scientific methods and evidence are disregarded as the handbook is developed. A must read for consumers and practitioners of the mental-health establishment, which through its creation of potentially damaging interpretations and labels, has the power to alter our lives in devastating ways.
Carlat, Daniel. Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry
In this stirring and beautifully written wake-up call, psychiatrist Daniel Carlat exposes deeply disturbing problems plaguing his profession, revealing the ways it has abandoned its essential purpose: to understand the mind, so that psychiatrists can heal mental illness and not just treat symptoms. As he did in his hard-hitting and widely read New York Times Magazine article “Dr. Drug Rep,” and as he continues to do in his popular watchdog newsletter, The Carlat Psychiatry Report, he writes with bracing honesty about how psychiatry has so largely forsaken the practice of talk therapy for the seductive—and more lucrative—practice of simply prescribing drugs, with a host of deeply troubling consequences.
Psychiatrists have settled for treating symptoms rather than causes, embracing the apparent medical rigor of DSM diagnoses and prescription in place of learning the more challenging craft of therapeutic counseling, gaining only limited understanding of their patients’ lives. Talk therapy takes time, whereas the fifteen-minute “med check” allows for more patients and more insurance company reimbursement. Yet DSM diagnoses, he shows, are premised on a good deal less science than we would think.
Writing from an insider’s perspective, with refreshing forthrightness about his own daily struggles as a practitioner, Dr. Carlat shares a wealth of stories from his own practice and those of others that demonstrate the glaring shortcomings of the standard fifteen-minute patient visit. He also reveals the dangers of rampant diagnoses of bipolar disorder, ADHD, and other “popular” psychiatric disorders, and exposes the risks of the cocktails of medications so many patients are put on. Especially disturbing are the terrible consequences of overprescription of drugs to children of ever younger ages. Taking us on a tour of the world of pharmaceutical marketing, he also reveals the inner workings of collusion between psychiatrists and drug companies.
Concluding with a road map for exactly how the profession should be reformed, Unhinged is vital reading for all those in treatment or considering it, as well as a stirring call to action for the large community of psychiatrists themselves. As physicians and drug companies continue to work together in disquieting and harmful ways, and as diagnoses—and misdiagnoses—of mental disorders skyrocket, it’s essential that Dr. Carlat’s bold call for reform is heeded.
Chamberlin, Judi. On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System
In 1966, in severe emotional distress after a miscarriage, 21-year-old Judi Chamberlin was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. Judi quickly discovered that as a patient it was nearly impossible to regain her freedom. She was told by hospital providers and administrators that she would never be able to live outside an institution.
Judi defied her prognosis and went on to help found what is known as the “psychiatric user, survivor and ex-patient movement.” She drew courage and inspiration from other social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including civil rights, women’s liberation, and gay liberation.
Published originally in 1977, “On Our Own: Patient Controlled Alternatives to the MH System” presents a scathing critique of traditional mental health “treatment” that is still very relevant to today’s mental health care system. It makes a compelling case for “patient-controlled services” — viable and more humane alternatives to the institutions that destroy the confident independence of so many people. This is a work of great hope and optimism.
Clifford, Terry. Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry: The Diamond Healing
The volume represents an introduction to the arcane Tibetan art of healing. The author discusses the many components of Tibetan Buddhist medicine. Included are its religious, philosophical and psychological foundations, its history and deities, its tantric and ritual aspects and unusual methods of diagnosis and cure.
Coles, Steven, Sarah Keenan and Bob Diamond. Madness Contested. Power and Practice
A critical review of how the mentally ill are treated both by the Mental Health Services and society, followed by alternatives to the current treatment of mental health based on views from nurses, service users, psychiatrists, psychologists, practitioners, and academics. This should be read by all those with an interest in mental health care.
Conrad, Peter. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders
Over the past half-century, the social terrain of health and illness has been transformed. What were once considered normal human events and common human problems—birth, aging, menopause, alcoholism, and obesity—are now viewed as medical conditions. For better or worse, medicine increasingly permeates aspects of daily life.
Building on more than three decades of research, Peter Conrad explores the changing forces behind this trend with case studies of short stature, social anxiety, “male menopause,” erectile dysfunction, adult ADHD, and sexual orientation. He examines the emergence of and changes in medicalization, the consequences of the expanding medical domain, and the implications for health and society. He finds in recent developments—such as the growing number of possible diagnoses and biomedical enhancements—the future direction of medicalization.
Cromby, John, David Harper and Paula Reavey. Psychology, Mental Health and Distress
What does the word ‘schizophrenia’ mean to you? Perhaps your first thought is of someone with a medical condition that involves some kind of brain disease? But what if you knew that the person in question had been through a traumatic childhood? Would that change how you thought about their mental health? And what impact does this have on how we as a society interact with people with mental distress?
Psychology, Mental Health and Distress is the first mainstream textbook that reconsiders the traditional emphasis on the biological and psychiatric models for what is commonly, but contentiously, known as ‘abnormal psychology’ or ‘psychopathology’. It provides a fully rounded account of mental distress, including social and relationship causes, and challenges your preconceptions about what you think you know about mental health.
Davies, James. Cracked: The Unhappy Truth About Psychiatry
This is a shocking exposé of the current state of psychiatry revealing how the patient’s wellbeing has been compromised by the power of the pharmaceutical industry.
In an effort to enlighten a new generation about its growing reliance on psychiatry, Cracked investigates why psychiatry has become the fastest-growing medical field in history; why psychiatric drugs are now more widely prescribed than ever before; and why psychiatry keeps expanding the number of mental disorders it believes to exist.
This revelatory volume shows that these issues can be explained by one startling fact: in recent decades psychiatry has become motivated by the pursuit of pharmaceutical riches. Readers will be shocked and dismayed to discover that psychiatry, in the name of helping others, has actually been helping itself.
Dawes, Robyn. House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth
Robin Dawes spares no one in this powerful critique of modern psychotherapeutic practice. As Dawes points out, we have all been swayed by the “pop psych” view of the world–believing, for example, that self-esteem is an essential precursor to being a productive human being, that events in one’s childhood affect one’s fate as an adult, and that “you have to love yourself before you can love another.”.
Dineen, Tana. Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People
After thirty years in the profession, Dr. Tana Dineen has written an unflinching critique of modern Psychology and Psychotherapy. This controversial best-selling exposé of the Psychology Industry was first published in 1996. Now available in its revised, updated and less expensive 3rd edition, it is no less popular nor less explosive than when it first appeared. Cited in Time and the New York Times, among other wide-circulation publications, Tana Dineen’s scathing attack on the abuses and misuses of corrupted psychotherapy is a must read for care-givers and caretakers alike and for would-be caretakers too.
Topics covered include Victim-Making, Fabricated Victims, Selling Psychology as a Science, The Business of Psychology, The Technology of Victim-Making, The Rise to Power of the Psychology Industry, and Living in the Shadow of the Psychology Industry. Fully supported by end of book notes and index, and with a suggested reading list, this is one of the most important books on psychology to appear in recent years. The author has been often–and always unsuccessfully–attacked by representatives of corporate psychology who have resorted to character assassination rather than reason to try and prove Dr. Dineen wrong.
Falloon, Ian R.H., Grainne Fadden. Integrated Mental Health Care: A Comprehensive, Community-Based Approach
This challenging book describes a new approach to the provision of mental health service to a community. Taking as their theoretical basis the vulnerability-stress model of mental illness, the authors place their findings and recommendations in the wider context of mental health care provision, and draw widely on international research in this field. They insist on a rigorous approach to the provision and evaluation of care, and use telling case studies to reveal the benefits as well as some of the difficulties that may be experienced. The practical, problem-solving and cost effective approach described in this book will be of the greatest interest to health care professionals in whatever treatment setting they may be working.
Fancher, Robert. Cultures of Healing: Correcting the Image of American Mental Health Care
This work contends that while mental health care is legitimate, many of its claims to scientific truth and authority are not. Written by a practicing psychotherapist, it argues that rather than operating as an objective science, the mental health profession is composed of competing “cultures” built around false ideology and subjective belief.
This book provides an analysis of how America came to see various forms of suffering as “mental illness,” arguing that social and historical dynamics, not scientific discovery, provided this notion. It critiques four cultures of therapy: psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cognitive therapy and biological therapy–discussing the historical significance, general principles and methods of treatment, worldview values and scientific status of each. It concludes with the author’s assessment of how best to view mental health care and use it wisely and effectively. An appendix offers an insight into choosing a therapist.
Fernando, Suman. Mental Health, Race and Culture
This powerful text offers a unique analysis of the impact of race and culture on contemporary issues in mental health. Drawing on extensive international experience, Fernando, considered one of the foremost commentators in the field, challenges the traditional ideas that inform practice in clinical psychology and psychiatry in order to promote new and alternative ways of thinking.
Covering both theoretical perspectives and practical implications, this insightful text discusses perceptions of ethnicity and identity, compares practices around the world and looks at racism in mental health services. Topics new to the third edition include:
- Trauma and psychosocial support
- The new discourses in mental health of recovery, spirituality and well-being
- The mental health of refugees
- Specific developments in low-income countries, including Asia and Africa
This fully revised, expanded and updated edition of a seminal text offers students and practitioners alike a comprehensive and reliable study of both western and non-western psychiatry and mental health practices.
Fernando, Suman. Mental Health Worldwide: Culture, Globalization, and Development
Mental Health Worldwide offers a perceptive critique of the universalized model of psychiatry and its apparent exportation from the West to the developing world. The foundational concepts of the dominant models in psychiatry, however, are understood very differently in non-western cultural traditions. Whilst there is a worldwide need to emphasize mental health in the context of public health, the ‘traditional psychiatric’ model, with its focus on medicalization and drug-based ‘cures’, may not always be appropriate, and its approaches should not be employed unquestioningly.
Here, Suman Fernando takes a much-needed critical look at the field of psychiatry in an international context, proposing suggestions for advancing mental health and wellbeing in low and middle income countries in a way that is ethical, sustainable and culturally sensitive. These lessons can also be applied to developing service provision in the West in our increasingly globalized world.
Fisher, Seymour and Roger Greenberg. From Placebo to Panacea: Putting Psychiatric Drugs to the Test
With the latest generation of psychoactive drugs, has pharmacology at last triumphed over mental illness? A close look at world scientific literature would suggest otherwise. The sobering truth is that many claims about the efficacy of drug therapies for everything from depression to schizophrenia have been exaggerated. What, then, accounts for the inflated confidence clinicians and the lay public alike often have in the new generation of “wonder drugs”? Find out in From Placebo to Panacea.
From Placebo to Panacea is not an indictment of drug therapy. Rather, it is a reasoned analysis of the efficacy of psychoactive drugs as compared to other forms of treatment–backed by hard empirical data. Above all, it is meant to function as a therapist’s and patient’s guide to making more informed decisions when considering treatment options.
The book begins with an in-depth discussion of salient problems with standard methods of measuring the usefulness of psychoactive drugs. Next is an exploration of a wide range of factors that can bias test results, both technical (e.g., patients participating in double-blind trials can usually tell whether they are receiving an inactive placebo or a psychoactive drug) and psychosocial. Also considered are problems arising from current systems for diagnosing mental disorders, including complications resulting from comorbidity.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
Perhaps the French philosopher’s masterpiece, which is concerned with an extraordinary question: What does it mean to be mad?
“Superb scholarship rendered with artistry” –The Nation
Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society
The Sane Society is a continuation and extension of the brilliant psychiatric concepts Erich Fromm first formulated in Escape from Freedom; it is also, in many ways, an answer to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Fromm examines man’s escape into overconformity and the danger of robotism in contemporary industrial society: modern humanity has, he maintains, been alienated from the world of their own creation. Here Fromm offers a complete and systematic exploration of his “humanistic psychoanalysis.” In so doing, he counters the profound pessimism for our future that Freud expressed and sets forth the goals of a society in which the emphasis is on each person and on the social measures designed to further function as a responsible individual.
Geekie, Jim (editor). Experiencing Psychosis: Personal and Professional Perspectives
Extensive scientific research has been conducted into understanding and learning more about psychotic experiences. However, in existing research the voice of subjective experience is rarely taken into consideration. In this book, first-person accounts are brought center-stage and examined alongside current research to suggest how personal experience can contribute to professional understanding, and therefore the treatment, of psychosis.
Experiencing Psychosis brings together a range of contributors who have either experienced psychosis on a personal level or conducted research into the topic. Chapters are presented in pairs providing information from both personal and research perspectives on specific aspects of psychosis including: hearing voices, delusional beliefs, and trauma as well as cultural, existential and spiritual issues. Experts from the field recognize that first and foremost psychosis is a human experience and that those who suffer from psychotic episodes must have some involvement in any genuine attempts to make sense of the experience.
Geekie, Jim. Making Sense of Madness: Contesting the Meaning of Schizophrenia
The experience of madness – which might also be referred to more formally as ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘psychosis’ – consists of a complex, confusing and often distressing collection of experiences, such as hearing voices or developing unusual, seemingly unfounded beliefs. Madness, in its various forms and guises, seems to be a ubiquitous feature of being human, yet our ability to make sense of madness, and our knowledge of how to help those who are so troubled, is limited.
Making Sense of Madness explores the subjective experiences of madness. Using clients’ stories and verbatim descriptions, it argues that the experience of ‘madness’ is an integral part of what it is to be human, and that greater focus on subjective experiences can contribute to professional understandings and ways of helping those who might be troubled by these experiences.
Goldacre, Ben. Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients
We like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence and the results of fair testing and clinical trials. In reality, those tests and trials are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors who write prescriptions for everything from antidepressants to cancer drugs to heart medication are familiar with the research literature about a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. We like to imagine that regulators have some code of ethics and let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve useless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients.
All these problems have been shielded from public scrutiny because they’re too complex to capture in a sound bite. But Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct in the medical industry affects us on a global scale.
Goldacre, Ben. Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
Have you ever wondered how one day the media can assert that alcohol is bad for us and the next unashamedly run a story touting the benefits of daily alcohol consumption? Or how a drug that is pulled off the market for causing heart attacks ever got approved in the first place? How can average readers, who aren’t medical doctors or Ph.D.s in biochemistry, tell what they should be paying attention to and what’s, well, just more bullshit?
Ben Goldacre has made a point of exposing quack doctors and nutritionists, bogus credentialing programs, and biased scientific studies. He has also taken the media to task for its willingness to throw facts and proof out the window. But he’s not here just to tell you what’s wrong. Goldacre is here to teach you how to evaluate placebo effects, double-blind studies, and sample sizes, so that you can recognize bad science when you see it. You’re about to feel a whole lot better.
Gnaulati, Enrico. Back to Normal: Why Ordinary Childhood Behavior is Mistaken for ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder
A veteran clinical psychologist exposes why doctors, teachers, and parents incorrectly diagnose healthy American children with serious psychiatric conditions.
In recent years there has been an alarming rise in the number of American children and youth assigned a mental health diagnosis. Current data from the Centers for Disease Control reveal a 41 percent increase in rates of ADHD diagnoses over the past decade and a forty-fold spike in bipolar disorder diagnoses. Similarly, the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder has increased by 78 percent since 2002.
Dr. Enrico Gnaulati, a clinical psychologist specializing in childhood and adolescent therapy and assessment, has witnessed firsthand the push to diagnose these disorders in youngsters. Drawing both on his own clinical experience and on cutting-edge research, with Back to Normal he has written the definitive account of why our kids are being dramatically overdiagnosed—and how parents and professionals can distinguish between true psychiatric disorders and normal childhood reactions to stressful life situations.
Gotzsche, Peter. Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare
http://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Medicines-Organised-Crime-Healthcare/dp/1846198844/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1421766529&sr=1-1&keywords=deadly+medicines+and+organized+crime+how+big+pharma+has+corrupted+healthcare
Prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. In his latest groundbreaking book, Peter C. Gotzsche exposes the pharmaceutical industries and their charade of fraudulent behavior, both in research and marketing where the morally repugnant disregard for human lives is the norm. He convincingly draws close comparisons with the tobacco conglomerates, revealing the extraordinary truth behind efforts to confuse and distract the public and their politicians. The book addresses, in evidence-based detail, an extraordinary system failure caused by widespread crime, corruption, bribery and impotent drug regulation in need of radical reforms.
Greenberg, Gary. The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry
Since its debut in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has set down the “official” view on what constitutes mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973. Each revision has created controversy, but the DSM-5 has taken fire for encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnesses—and to prescribe sometimes unnecessary or harmful medications.
Respected author and practicing psychotherapist Gary Greenberg embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition, and returned with an unsettling tale. Exposing the deeply flawed process behind the DSM-5’s compilation, The Book of Woe reveals how the manual turns suffering into a commodity—and made the APA its own biggest beneficiary.
Halliburton, Murphy. Mudpacks and Prozac: Experiencing Ayurvedic, Biomedical, and Religious Healing
People seeking psychiatric healing choose from an almost dizzying array of therapies—from the medicated mudpacks of Ayurveda, to the pharmacopeia of Western biomedicine, to the spiritual pathways of the world’s religions. How do we choose, what do the treatments offer, and how do they cure? In Mudpacks and Prozac, Murphy Halliburton investigates the very different ways in which Ayurvedic, Western, and religious (Christian, Muslim, and Hindu) healing systems define psychiatric problems and cures.
He describes people’s embodied experiences of therapies that range from soothing to frightening, and explores how enduring pleasure or pain affects healing. And through evocative portraits of patients in Kerala, India—a place of incredible cultural diversity that has become a Mecca for alternative medicine—Halliburton shows how sociopolitical changes around the globe may be limiting the ways in which people seek and experience health care, with negative effects on our quality of health and quality of life.
Hammer, Leon. Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies: Psychology and Chinese Medicine
Behind the acupuncture, herbal remedies and sophisticated diagnostics of Chinese medicine lies a “congenial system of healing that embodies unification of body and mind, spirit and matter, nature and man, philosophy and reality.” In this comprehensive and groundbreaking presentation, based on long experience as physician, psychiatrist, and practitioner of Chinese medicine, Leon Hammer offers a new model for appreciating the traditional healer’s effective and profound respect for individual integrity and energetic balance.
Explaining, and moving beyond, the five-phase (element) system, he shows that this Eastern practice is as much a spiritual science as a physical one. Accessible to the layman, yet a resource for the professional in any healing art, this book examines the natural energy functions of the human organism as a key to mental, emotional and spiritual health. It offers new insight into disease, showing how it is not merely an invasion from the outside, but rather a byproduct of a person’s unsuccessful attempt to restore one’s own balance.
Healy, David. Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression
Prozac. Paxil. Zoloft. Turn on your television and you are likely to see a commercial for one of the many selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on the market. We hear a lot about them, but do we really understand how these drugs work and what risks are involved for anyone who uses them?
Let Them Eat Prozac explores the history of SSRIs—from their early development to their latest marketing campaigns—and the controversies that surround them. Initially, they seemed like wonder drugs for those with mild to moderate depression. When Prozac was released in the late 1980s, David Healy was among the psychiatrists who prescribed it. But he soon observed that some of these patients became agitated and even attempted suicide. Could the new wonder drug actually be making patients worse?
Healy, David. Pharmageddon
This searing indictment, David Healy’s most comprehensive and forceful argument against the pharmaceuticalization of medicine, tackles problems in health care that are leading to a growing number of deaths and disabilities. Healy, who was the first to draw attention to the now well-publicized suicide-inducing side effects of many anti-depressants, attributes our current state of affairs to three key factors: product rather than process patents on drugs, the classification of certain drugs as prescription-only, and industry-controlled drug trials.
These developments have tied the survival of pharmaceutical companies to the development of blockbuster drugs, so that they must overhype benefits and deny real hazards. Healy further explains why these trends have basically ended the possibility of universal health care in the United States and elsewhere around the world. He concludes with suggestions for reform of our currently corrupted evidence-based medical system.
Healy, David. The Creation of Psychopharmacology
David Healy follows his widely praised study, The Antidepressant Era, with an even more ambitious and dramatic story: the discovery and development of antipsychotic medication. Healy argues that the discovery of chlorpromazine (more generally known as Thorazine) is as significant in the history of medicine as the discovery of penicillin, reminding readers of the worldwide prevalence of insanity within living memory.
But Healy tells not of the triumph of science but of a stream of fruitful accidents, of technological discovery leading neuroscientific research, of fierce professional competition and the backlash of the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s. A chemical treatment was developed for one purpose, and as long as some theoretical rationale could be found, doctors administered it to the insane patients in their care to see if it would help. Sometimes it did, dramatically. Why these treatments worked, Healy argues provocatively, was, and often still is, a mystery. Nonetheless, such discoveries made and unmade academic reputations and inspired intense politicking for the Nobel Prize.
Hobart, Angela. Healing Performances of Bali: Between Darkness and Light
Contemporary western societies have tended to proclaim a separation between the scientific and artistic, or the human and non-human. In Bali, these dimensions are intertwined as this study shows. Although the island is undergoing rapid change and modernization, the traditional medical system, which includes myth, movement, dialogue, comedy, and a spectacular masking tradition, has remained an integral part of Bali society.
It is deeply embedded in a network of social relations that extends far beyond the parameters of the rituals themselves. The healing performances discussed in this book take into account healing by spirit mediums and scholarly healers, the masked ritual drama, and the shadow theater. These animated performances take place during the annual religious festival that is aimed at individual well being as well as social regeneration, brought to life in this volume through rich illustrative material.
Hornstein, Gail. Agnes’ Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness
In a Victorian-era German asylum, seamstress Agnes Richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform. Despite every attempt to silence them, hundreds of other patients have managed to get their stories out, at least in disguised form, and so it continues today. A vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric illness and the experiences of those who suffer.
Hornstein’s brilliant work helps us to bridge that gulf, guiding us through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, and paranoia and emerging with nothing less than a new model for understanding so-called ‘mental illness’, one another and ourselves. One which asks not ‘what’s wrong with you’ but ‘what happened to you and how did you manage to survive?’
Horwitz, Allan and Jerome Wakefield. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder
Depression has become the single most commonly treated mental disorder, amid claims that one out of ten Americans suffer from this disorder every year and 25% succumb at some point in their lives. Warnings that depressive disorder is a leading cause of worldwide disability have been accompanied by a massive upsurge in the consumption of antidepressant medication, widespread screening for depression in clinics and schools, and a push to diagnose depression early, on the basis of just a few symptoms, in order to prevent more severe conditions from developing.
In The Loss of Sadness, Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield argue that, while depressive disorder certainly exists and can be a devastating condition warranting medical attention, the apparent epidemic in fact reflects the way the psychiatric profession has understood and reclassified normal human sadness.
House, Richard. Against and For CBT: Towards a Constructive Dialogue
This collection represents the first attempt to engage in print with the controversies and complexities that have exercised – sometimes painfully – the therapy and counseling world, as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has risen to such cultural prominence. Essential reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and counselors of each and every approach who are concerned with understanding the phenomenon that is ‘CBT and its discontents.’
Johnstone, Lucy. A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Diagnosis
This is a myth-busting new book, in this popular series, about psychiatric diagnosis and the flaws therein by a leading critical voice. Previous titles in the series have sold strongly to a mainstream audience as well as to students and practitioners.
Dr. Lucy Johnstone is a consultant clinical psychologist, author of ‘Users and abusers of psychiatry’ (2nd edition Routledge 2000) and co-editor of ‘Formulation in psychology and psychotherapy: making sense of people’s problems’ (Routledge, 2nd edition 2013) along with a number of other chapters and articles taking a critical perspective on mental health theory and practice.
Johnstone, Lucy. Formulation in Psychology and Psychotherapy: Making Sense of People’s Problems
The first edition of Formulation in Psychology and Psychotherapy caught the wave of growing interest in formulation in a clinical context. This completely updated and revised edition summarizes recent practice, research, developments and debates while retaining the features that made the first a leading text in the field. It contains new chapters on personal construct formulation, formulation in health settings, and the innovative practice of using formulation in teams.
The book sees formulation as a dynamic process that explores personal meaning collaboratively and reflectively, taking account of relational and social contexts. Two case studies, one adult and one child, illustrate the use of formulation from the perspectives of expert clinicians from six different theoretical positions. The book encourages the reader to take a constructively critical perspective on the many philosophical, professional and ethical debates raised by the process of formulating people’s problems.
Johnstone, Lucy. Users and Abusers of Psychiatry: A Critical Look at Psychiatric Practice
Users and Abusers of Psychiatry is a radically different, critical account of the day-to-day practice of psychiatry. Using real-life examples and her own experience as a clinical psychologist, Lucy Johnstone argues that the traditional way of treating mental illness can often exacerbate people’s original difficulties leaving them powerless, disabled and distressed.
In this completely revised and updated second edition, she draws on a range of evidence to present a very different understanding of psychiatric breakdown than that found in standard medical textbooks. Users and Abusers of Psychiatry is a challenging but ultimately inspiring read for all who are involved in mental health – whether as professionals, students, service users, relatives or interested lay people.
Joseph, Jay. The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes
What causes psychiatric disorders to appear? Are they primarily the result of people s environments, or of their genes? Increasingly, we are told that research has confirmed the importance of genetic influences on psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This timely, challenging book provides a much-needed critical appraisal of the evidence cited in support of genetic theories of psychiatric disorders, which hold that these disorders are caused by an inherited genetic predisposition in combination with environmental agents or events. In fact, the field of psychiatric genetics is approaching the crisis stage due to the continuing failure, despite years of concerted worldwide efforts, to identify genes presumed to underlie most mental disorders.
The belief that such genes exist is based on studies of families, twins, and adoptees. However, the author shows that these studies provide little if any scientifically acceptable evidence in support of genetics. In fact, researchers initial “discoveries” are rarely replicated. As this becomes more understood, and as fruitless gene finding efforts continue to pile up, we may well be headed towards a paradigm shift in psychiatry away from genetic and biological explanations of mental disorders, and towards a greater understanding of how family, social, and political environments contribute to human psychological distress.
Kakar, Sudhir. Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry Into India and its Healing Traditions
Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and scholar, brilliantly illuminates the ancient healing traditions of India embodied in the rituals of shamans, the teachings of gurus, and the precepts of the school of medicine known as Ayurveda.
“With extraordinary sympathy, open-mindedness, and insight Sudhir Kakar has drawn from both his Eastern and Western backgrounds to show how the gulf that divides native healer from Western psychiatrist can be spanned.”—Rosemary Dinnage, New York Review of Books
Kinderman, Peter. A Prescription for Psychiatry: Why We Need a Whole New Approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing
A Prescription for Psychiatry lays bare the flaws and failings of traditional mental health care and offers a radical alternative. Exposing the old-fashioned biological ‘disease model’ of psychiatry as unscientific and unhelpful, it calls for a revolution in the way we plan and deliver care.
Kinderman challenges the way we think about mental health problems, arguing that the origins of distress are largely social, and urges a change from a ‘disease model’ to a ‘psychosocial model’. The book persuasively argues that we should significantly reduce our use of psychiatric medication, and help should be tailored to each person’s unique needs. This is a manifesto for an entirely new approach to psychiatric care; one that truly offers care rather than coercion, therapy rather than medication, and a return to the common sense appreciation that distress is usually an understandable reaction to life’s challenges.
Kirk, Stuart, Tomi Gomory and David Cohen. Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs
Mad Science argues that the fundamental claims of modern American psychiatry are based on misconceived, flawed, and distorted science. The authors address multiple paradoxes in American mental health research, including the remaking of coercion into scientific psychiatric treatment, the adoption of an unscientific diagnostic system that controls the distribution of services, and how drug treatments have failed to improve the mental health outcome.
When it comes to understanding and treating mental illness, distortions of research are not rare, misinterpretation of data is not isolated, and bogus claims of success not voiced by isolated researchers seeking aggrandizement. This book’s detailed analysis of coercion and community treatment, diagnosis, and psychopharmacology reveals that these characteristics are endemic, institutional, and protected in psychiatry. They are not just bad science, but mad science.
Kirk, Stuart. Mental Disorders in the Social Environment
Social workers provide more mental health services than any other profession, yet recent biomedical trends in psychiatry appear to minimize the importance of their traditional concerns, which focus on the social environment that accompanies mental disorders and their treatment. In twenty-four chapters written by distinguished scholars this book not only calls attention to this emerging problem and challenges conventional mental health beliefs and practices, but also raises provocative questions: Has social work become too closely associated with psychiatry and too quick to adopt a medical approach? Has the focus on the therapeutic relationship negated social work’s commitment to social reform? Is the social worker marginalized by the emphasis in mental health on biochemistry and psychopharmacology?
This book calls on social workers and other health care professionals to be more skeptical about diagnosis, community treatment, evidence-based practice, psychotherapy, medications, and managed care.
Kirk, Stuart and Herb Kutchins. The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry
When it was first published in 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition—universally known as DSM-III—embodied a radical new method for identifying psychiatric illness. Kirk and Kutchins challenge the general understanding about the research data and the process that led to the peer acceptance of DSM-III. Their original and controversial reconstruction of that moment concentrates on how a small group of researchers interpreted their findings about a specific problem—psychiatric reliability—to promote their beliefs about mental illness and to challenge the then-dominant Freudian paradigm.
Kirsch, Irving. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
Irving Kirsch has the world doubting the efficacy of antidepressants. Based on fifteen years of research, The Emperor’s New Drugs makes an overwhelming case that what the medical community considered a cornerstone of psychiatric treatment is little more than a faulty consensus. But Kirsch does more than just criticize: He offers a path society can follow to stop popping pills and start proper treatment.
Kleinman, Arthur. Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience
In this book, Kleinman proposes an international view of mental illness and mental care. He examines how the prevalence and nature of disorders vary in different cultures, how clinicians make their diagnoses, and how they heal, and the educational and practical implications of a true understanding of the interplay between biology and culture.
Kutchins, Herb and Stuart Kirk. Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders
Making Us Crazy is a powerful and challenging book that forces us to question the labels which are now commonly imposed on us by the American bible of mental syndromes.
Laing, R. D. Politics of Experience
R.D. Laing is at his most wickedly iconoclastic in this eloquent assault on conventional morality. Unorthodox to some, brilliantly original to others, The Politics of Experience goes beyond the usual theories of mental illness and alienation, and makes a convincing case for the “madness of morality.” Compelling, unsettling, consistently absorbing, The Politics of Experience is a classic of genuine importance that will “excite, enthrall, and disturb. No one who reads it will remain unaffected.” (Rollo May, Saturday Review)
Laurance, Jeremy. Pure Madness: How Fear Drives the Mental Health System
Public alarm for random attacks by mentally ill people is at an all-time high. The brutal killing of Jill Dando, the TV personality, and the assault on George Harrison, the former Beatle, are among the cases that have undermined confidence in the mental health service. Community care is widely seen as a failed policy that has left too many people walking the streets, posing a risk to themselves and a threat to others. The Government has responded with a programme of change billed as the biggest reform in forty years, but will it achieve the ‘safe, sound, supportive’ service as promised?
For Pure Madness, Jeremy Laurance travelled across the country observing the care provided to mentally ill people in Britain today. Based on interviews, visits and case histories, his book reveals a service driven by fear.
Levine, Bruce. Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy and Community in a World Gone Crazy
Millions of us have experienced periods of low morale, struggled to find cheer in the day-to-day world, and then found ourselves pacified into believing the smooth-talking spokesperson in yet another medication ad. We’ve all heard them, there’s no denying the fact that these ads have made each of us wonder: Do I suffer from depression? Would I be happier and healthier if I simply consulted my physician and requested (insert drug name here)?
The rate of clinical depression in the U.S. has increased more than tenfold in the last fifty years. Is this epidemic properly being addressed by the insurance, pharmaceutical, and governmental powers-that-be or exacerbated by a failing system focused on instant results and high profit margins? Dr. Bruce E. Levine, a highly respected clinical psychologist, argues the latter and provides a compelling alternative approach to treating depression that makes lasting change more likely than with symptom-based treatment through medication.
Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic delves into the roots of depression and links our increasingly consumer-based culture and standard-practice psychiatric treatments to worsening depression, instead of solving it. In an easy-to-understand narrative style, Dr. Levine prescribes antidotes to depression including the keys to building morale and self-healing. Unlike short-term, drug-based solutions, these antidotes foster a long-term cycle where people rediscover passion and purpose, and find meaning in acting on their societal concerns.
Lipsedge, Maurice and Roland Littlewood. Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry
In this classic text the authors examine the links between racism, psychological ill health and inadequate treatment of ethnic minorities. Through a series of case studies they discuss:
* the psychological legacy of colonialism and slavery
* the racist bias in psychiatric and psychological theory
* diagnostic bias
* the role of religion in mental health or illness
* the value of anthropological and psychoanalytic insights.
The concluding chapter in this edition reviews the development of ‘transcultural psychiatry’ and summarizes changes in administration of the Mental Health Act.
Lock, Andy and Tom Strong. Discursive Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice
For an endeavor that is largely based on conversation it may seem obvious to suggest that psychotherapy is discursive. After all, therapists and clients primarily use talk, or forms of discourse, to accomplish therapeutic aims. However, talk or discourse has usually been seen as secondary to the actual business of therapy – a necessary conduit for exchanging information between therapist and client, but seldom more. Psychotherapy primarily developed by mapping particular experiential domains in ways responsive to human intervention. Only recently though has the role that discourse plays been recognized as a focus in itself for analysis and intervention.
Luhrmann, Tania. Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry
With sharp and soulful insight, T. R. Luhrmann examines the world of psychiatry, a profession which today is facing some of its greatest challenges from within and without, as it continues to offer hope to many.
At a time when mood-altering drugs have revolutionized the treatment of the mentally ill and HMO’s are forcing caregivers to take the pharmacological route over the talking cure, Luhrmann places us at the heart of the matter and allows us to see exactly what is at stake. Based on extensive interviews with patients and doctors, as well as investigative fieldwork in residence programs, private psychiatric hospitals, and state hospitals, Luhrmann’s groundbreaking book shows us how psychiatrists develop and how the enormous ambiguities in the field affect its practitioners and patients.
Maisel, Eric. Life Purpose Boot Camp
As life gets busier and more complicated we crave something larger and more meaningful than just ticking another item off our to-do list. In the past, we’ve looked to religion or outside guidance for that sense of purpose, but today fewer people are fulfilled by traditional approaches to meaning. Bestselling author, psychotherapist, and creativity coach Eric Maisel offers an alternative: an eight-week intensive that breaks through barriers and offers insights for living each day with purpose. Once you understand how meaning operates, how meaning and life purpose are related, and what concrete steps you can take toward fulfilling your purpose, you will never run out of meaning again. This program will develop self-awareness and self-confidence and give you what you need to fully live the best possible life.
Maisel, Eric. Mastering Creative Anxiety
In his decades as a psychotherapist and creativity coach, Eric Maisel has found a common thread behind what often gets labeled “writer’s block,” “procrastination,” or “stage fright.” It’s the particular anxiety that, paradoxically, keeps creators from doing, completing, or sharing the work they are driven toward. This “creative anxiety” can take the form of avoiding the work, declaring it not good enough, or failing to market it — and it can cripple creators for decades, even lifetimes. But Maisel has learned what sets successful creators apart. He shares these strategies here, including artist-specific stress management; how to work despite bruised egos, day jobs, and other inevitable frustrations; and what not to do to deal with anxiety. Implementing these 24 lessons replaces the pain of not creating with the profound rewards of free artistic self-expression.
Maisel, Eric. Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning
In this provocative and path-breaking distillation of a career spent working with individuals seeking help with mood and motivation, Eric Maisel reveals the implications of one of the era’s most dramatic cultural shifts. In recent decades, much of the unhappiness inherent in the human condition has been monetized into the disease of depression and related “disorders.” Maisel persuasively critiques this sickness model and prescribes a potent new approach that updates the best ideas of modern psychology. The result is a revolutionary reimagining of life’s difficulties and a liberating model of self-care that optimizes our innate human ability to create meaning and seize opportunity — in any circumstance.
Maisel, Eric. Why Smart People Hurt
The challenges smart and creative people encounter–from scientific researchers, genius award winners, to bestselling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered attorneys, and academics–often include anxiety, over-thinking, mania, sadness, and despair.
In Why Smart People Hurt, psychotherapist Dr. Eric Maisel draws on his many years of work with the best and the brightest to pinpoint these often devastating challenges and offer solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology.
His thoughtful strategies include using logic and creativity to cope with the problems of having a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hat. With a series of questions at the end of each chapter, he guides the reader to create his or her own roadmap to a calm and meaningful life.
Masson, Jeffrey. Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing
In this groundbreaking and highly controversial book, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson attacks the very foundations of modern psychotherapy from Freud to Jung, from Fritz Perls to Carl Rodgers. With passion and clarity, Against Therapy addresses the profession’s core weaknesses, contending that, since therapy’s aim is to change people, and this is achieved according to the therapist’s own notions and prejudices, the psychological process is necessarily corrupt. With a foreword by the eminent British psychologist Dorothy Rowe, this cogent and convincing book has shattering implications.
Metzl, Jonathan. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease
The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.
Mills, China. Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrization of the Majority World
Decolonizing Global Mental Health is a book that maps a strange irony. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Movement for Global Mental Health are calling to ‘scale up’ access to psychological and psychiatric treatments globally, particularly within the global South. Simultaneously, in the global North, psychiatry and its often chemical treatments are coming under increased criticism (from both those who take the medication and those in the position to prescribe it).
The book argues that it is imperative to explore what counts as evidence within Global Mental Health, and seeks to de-familiarize current ‘Western’ conceptions of psychology and psychiatry using postcolonial theory. It leads us to wonder whether we should call for equality in global access to psychiatry, whether everyone should have the right to a psychotropic citizenship and whether mental health can, or should, be global. As such, it is ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers in the fields of critical psychology and psychiatry, social and health psychology, cultural studies, public health and social work.
Moloney, Paul. The Therapy Industry: The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure and Why It Doesn’t Work
Across the world anxiety, stress and depression are on the increase, a trend that looks set to continue as austerity measures bite. The official response tells people that unhappiness is just a personal problem, rather than a social one. Written by a practicing psychologist, with nearly thirty years’ experience in the fields of mental health and learning disabilities, The Therapy Industry offers a concise, accessible and critical overview of the world of psychological practice in Britain and the USA.
Paul Moloney argues that much therapy is geared towards compliance and acceptance of the status quo, rather than attempting to facilitate social change. The Therapy Industry fundamentally challenges our conceptions of happiness and wellbeing. Moloney argues that therapeutic and applied psychology have little basis in science, that their benefits are highly exaggerated and they prosper because they serve the interests of power.
Moncrieff, Joanna. A Straight Talking Guide to Psychiatric Drugs
Psychiatric drugs and their use are amongst the most hotly debated issues in the 21st century. How they work, whether they are effective, how to understand the evidence, and explanations of the major categories of psychiatric drugs are all covered in this clearly written guide. The competing theories of drug action are also explained in easy-to-understand terms.
Moncrieff, Joanna. The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs
Antipsychotic (neuroleptic) drugs have become some of the biggest blockbusters of the early 21st century, increasingly prescribed not just to people with ‘schizophrenia’ or other severe forms of mental disturbance but for a range of more common psychological complaints. This book challenges the accepted account that portrays antipsychotics as specific treatments that target an underlying brain disease and explores early views that suggested, in contrast, that antipsychotics achieve their effects by inducing a state of neurological suppression. Professional enthusiasm for antipsychotics eclipsed this understanding, exaggerated the benefits of antipsychotics and minimized or ignored evidence of their toxic effects. The pharmaceutical industry has been involved in expanding the use of antipsychotics into territory where it is likely that their dangers far outweigh their advantages.
Moncrieff, Joanna. The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment
This controversial book overturns the claim that psychiatric drugs work by correcting chemical imbalance, and analyzes the professional, commercial and political vested interests that have shaped this view. It provides a comprehensive critique of research on drugs including antidepressants, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers.
Moodley, Roy and William West. Integrating Traditional Healing Practices Into Counselling and Psychotherapy
Integrating Traditional Healing Practices Into Counseling and Psychotherapy critically examines ethnic minority cultural and traditional healing in relation to counseling and psychotherapy. Authors Roy Moodley and William West highlight the challenges and changes in the field of multicultural counseling and psychotherapy by integrating current issues of traditional healing with contemporary practice. The book uniquely presents a range of accounts of the dilemmas and issues facing students, professional counselors, psychotherapists, social workers, researchers, and others who use multicultural counseling or transcultural psychotherapy as part of their professional practice.
Moskowitz, Andrew, Ingo Shafer and Martin Justin Dorahy. Psychosis, Trauma and Dissociation: Emerging Perspectives on Severe Psychopathology
In the 100 years since Eugen Bleuler unveiled his concept of schizophrenia, which had dissociation at its core, the essential connection between traumatic life events, dissociative processes and psychotic symptoms has been lost. Psychosis, Trauma and Dissociation is the first book to attempt to reforge this connection, by presenting challenging new findings linking these now disparate fields, and by comprehensively surveying, from a wide range of perspectives, the complex relationship between dissociation and psychosis.
A cutting-edge sourcebook, Psychosis, Trauma and Dissociation brings together highly-respected professionals working in the psychosis field with renowned clinicians and researchers from the fields of traumatic stress, dissociation and the dissociative disorders, and will be of interest to those working with or studying psychotic or dissociative disorders, as well as trauma-related conditions such as borderline personality disorder or complex post-traumatic stress disorder. It makes an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning literature on severe mental disorders and serious life events.
Neimeyer, Robert and Jonathan Raskin. Constructions of Disorder: Meaning-Making Frameworks for Psychotherapy
This collection of articles from leading constructivist, narrative, and social constructionist theorists and therapists describes alternatives to traditional diagnoses and treatment that humanize the assessment process and promote meaningful therapeutic change. By emphasizing the personal and social processes of language and meaning making in creating and resolving problems, contributors consider how psychotherapists can conceptualize human distress in a way that gives direction to therapy without stigmatizing or pathologizing their clients. Integrating postmodern theory and clinical practice, authors focus on such techniques as experiential exploration of the client’s tacit self-knowledge, narrative reconstruction, and the deconstruction of oppressive cultural discourses. Throughout, the discussion is anchored with detailed case illustrations.
Newnes, Craig and Cailzie Dunn. This is Madness: A Critical Look at Psychiatry and the Future of Mental Health Services
This is Madness examines the past, present and possible future of the British mental health system. In this volume, users of services, professionals and academics come together to explore the roles and practices of the mental health service, its place within society and the experiences of those in the system. In eighteen chapters the authors discuss the history of psychiatry, the validity of diagnostic systems and the value of traditional medical and alternative approaches to emotional distress and crisis. Recent changes in mental health legislation and their likely impact on the future shape of mental health services are presented in a way accessible to lay readers, students and mental health practitioners alike. This book will be an invaluable resource for all those involved with, or training for a career in mental health services.
Newnes, Craig. This is Madness Too: Critical Perspectives on Mental Health Services
A companion volume to the best selling This is Madness: At a time when there is an extraordinary energy for change in the world of mental health, This is Madness Too offers a compassionate and scholarly critique of the treatment of children, government policy, the use of antidepressants and a host of other areas fundamental to mental health services. It brings together the views of service users and professionals in a passionate attempt to tell it as it is.
Parker, Ian, Eugenie Georgaca, et al. Deconstructing Psychopathology
`Fast becoming a contemporary classic … this book tries both to be critical and engender critical thinking in a number of ways. It offers an overview of a number of theories that address human distress as well as particular forms of “pathology.” This book effectively highlights the way that western society has taken “normal” and “abnormal” emotional states to be factual entities rather than the constructed understandings of human phenomena that they are … should be on the reading list of every course//module that attends to human distress.’ – Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis
Parker, Ian. Psychology After the Crisis: Scientific Paradigms and Political Debate
Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker, features a newly written introduction and presents a focused overview of a key topic area.
Psychology After the Crisis is the first volume in the series and addresses three important questions:
- What was the crisis in psychology and why does it continue now?
- How did debates regarding the traditional ‘laboratory experiment’ paradigm in psychology set the scene for discourse analysis?
- Why are these paradigm debates now crucial for understanding contemporary critical psychology?
Pembroke, Louise. Self-Harm: Perspectives From Personal Experience
Perhaps the most important book on self-harm ever to come to print, Louise Pembroke’s book, subtitled ‘Perspectives from Experience’, helps to reduce the mystery and perverse glamour that surrounds this controversial issue.
Self-harm is harrowing both for those who go through it and for those who watch while a loved one suffers. To most of us, it is inexplicable. This book attempts to answer the critical question – why? This collection of stories, written by self-harmers themselves, produces a clearer picture of what self-harmers go through and how they think and react. This publication is an important text for anyone who has been through self-harm or for those who work with them.
Pilgrim, David. Psychotherapy and Society
`This is a very important book … This is a book that clearly challenges those of us who subscribe to a view of the self in relationship with society to examine ourselves and our practices and respond appropriately’ – Self & Society
This pioneering book demonstrates that counselling and psychotherapy cannot be separated from the social conditions and context in which practitioners and their clients operate. Until now, no single text has brought together and considered the two areas of psychotherapy and social science in conjunction.
Pilgrim, David, Richard Bentall, et al. Straight Talking Guide to Psychological Treatments for Mental Health Problems
‘Psychological treatments’ is shorthand for a range of interventions, which are called ‘talking treatment’, ‘psychological therapy’, ‘counselling’ or ‘psychotherapy’. In this compact book, David Pilgrim explores the origins, trustworthiness and usefulness of these interventions and concludes with a comprehensive glossary describing over 20 different approaches to psychotherapy. The challenging content and accessible style both ensure that therapy practitioners, support workers, students and users of mental health services will be both informed and stimulated.
Power, Mick. Madness Cracked
‘The recent publication of a new edition of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) highlighted the two contrary viewpoints that exist within the field of mental health. There are those who value such classification systems, seeing each revision of the DSM as a fine-tuning exercise, and there are those who are strongly opposed, seeing such exercises as fundamentally flawed.
Madness Cracked provides a fascinating introduction to the history of psychiatry and clinical psychology, looking at how these areas have attempted to classify the various problems and disorders that their practitioners have faced in everyday use. Within the book, Power argues that – as in other areas of science – progress can only be made if the classification systems that are used have a sound theoretical basis. In addition, he outlines a model derived from work on cognition and emotion showing how, with appropriate modifications, it could provide a theoretical basis for classification and diagnosis.
Rao, Anthony and Michelle Seaton. The Way of Boys: Promoting the Social and Emotional Development of Young Boys
Boys today are being bombarded with a slew of diagnoses—ADHD, Asperger’s, bipolar disorder—at an alarming rate and at younger ages. The Way of Boys urges parents, educators, pediatricians, psychologists, and other developmental experts to reevaluate and significantly change how we deal with our youngest boys. When parents understand the wide spectrum for normal boy development, they can successfully communicate with their son—and everyone in their son’s life—and help him grow into a healthy and smart young man.
Dr. Anthony Rao challenges some of the potentially harmful assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors we’ve developed toward young boyhood over the last few decades. The Way of Boys is a celebration of natural, constructive boyhood development and an expert, definitive handbook on what to look for and expect in normal growth.
Rapley, Mark, Joanna Moncrieff and Jacqui Dillon. De-Medicalizing Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition
Psychiatry and psychology have constructed a mental health system that does no justice to the problems it claims to understand and creates multiple problems for its users. Yet the myth of biologically-based mental illness defines our present. This book rethinks madness and distress reclaiming them as human, not medical, experiences.
Read, John and Jacqui Dillon. Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Madness
Are hallucinations and delusions really symptoms of an illness called ‘schizophrenia’? Are mental health problems really caused by chemical imbalances and genetic predispositions? Are psychiatric drugs as effective and safe as the drug companies claim? Is madness preventable?
This second edition of Models of Madness challenges those who hold to simplistic, pessimistic and often damaging theories and treatments of madness. In particular it challenges beliefs that madness can be explained without reference to social causes and challenges the excessive preoccupation with chemical imbalances and genetic predispositions as causes of human misery, including the conditions that are given the name ‘schizophrenia.’ This edition updates the now extensive body of research showing that hallucinations, delusions etc. are best understood as reactions to adverse life events and that psychological and social approaches to helping are more effective and far safer than psychiatric drugs and electroshock treatment. A new final chapter discusses why such a damaging ideology has come to dominate mental health and, most importantly, how to change that.
Romme, Marcus, Sandra Escher, et al. Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery
This book is a groundbreaking development in modern mental health because it recognizes the importance of the first hand experience and argues that hearing voices is not a sign of madness but a reaction to serious problems in life. Must-read book for all concerned with mental health issues.
Romme, Marcus and Sandra Escher. Psychosis as a Personal Crisis: An Experienced-Based Approach
Psychosis as a Personal Crisis seeks to challenge the way people who hear voices are both viewed and treated. This book emphasizes the individual variation between people who suffer from psychosis and puts forward the idea that hearing voices is not in itself a sign of mental illness.
In this book the editors bring together an international range of expert contributors, who in their daily work, their research or their personal acquaintance, focus on the personal experience of psychosis.
Further topics of discussion include:
+ accepting and making sense of hearing voices
+ the relation between trauma and paranoia
+ the limitations of contemporary psychiatry
+ the process of recovery
Rosemond, John and Bose Ravenel. The Diseasing of America’s Children: Exposing the ADHD Fiasco and Empowering Parents to Take Back Control
How parents, teachers, and even professionals are being deceived by the “ADHD Establishment” regarding ADHD and other childhood behavior disorders and the drugs used to treat them.
The issue of diagnosing children with behavioral diseases that do not conform to a scientific definition of disease, and then medicating them is a scandal ready to erupt. In The Diseasing of America’s Children, popular family psychologist, speaker, and best-selling author John Rosemond joins with pediatrician Dr. Bose Ravenel to uncover the fiction and fallacy behind attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), early-onset bipolar disorder (EOBD), and the drugs prescribed to treat them. Rosemond and Ravenel will:
- reveal the pseudo-science behind these diagnoses
- explain how parents, teachers, and even professionals are deceived
- expose the short- and long-term dangers behavioral drugs pose to children
- discuss how America’s schools are unwittingly feeding the diagnostic beast
- reveal the simple, common sense truth behind these behavior problems
- and give parents a practical program for curing these problems without drugs or dependence on professionals
Ross, Colin and Alvin Pam. Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry: Blaming the Body
Lately, it seems that not a day passes without the media proclaiming yet another sensational breakthrough in the search for the physical origins of mental illness. But beyond all the fanfare and media hype, is there a single shred of hard, empirical evidence to substantiate the existence of “a gene for alcoholism,” or “the brain chemistry behind schizophrenia”? More to the point, in fact, is it scientifically sound to limit the search for the roots of mental illness to processes occurring within the body, while dismissing socioeconomic, familial, and experiential influences as, at best, mere “triggering mechanisms”?
And, if not, what harm is being done by psychiatry’s current obsession with these somatic chimeras? This groundbreaking book offers answers to those questions and more. While Dr. Ross and Professor Pam clearly assert from the outset that biological psychiatry “is dominated by a reductionist ideology which distorts and misrepresents much of its research,” this is by no means a raw polemic voiced by an overzealous opposition. Instead, it is a reasoned discourse based on a clear-sighted and methodical examination of the professional literature.
Shannon, Scott. Mental Health for the Whole Child
A leading pediatric psychiatrist shows clinicians a holistic, full-spectrum approach to children’s well-being.
Every child possesses enormous untapped potential, and yet the number of kids suffering from mental illness today seems to creep ever upward. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, OCD, oppositional defiant disorder, anger issues—you name it—are increasingly prevalent, leaving clinician’s offices packed with worried parents and caregivers, wondering how they can help their children.
In this book, child psychiatrist Scott Shannon offers a refreshing new path for practitioners who are eager for a more optimistic view of children’s mental health, one that emphasizes a child’s inherent resilience and resources over pathology and prescriptions.
Shannon, Scott. Parenting the Whole Child
Understanding child health and wellness through a holistic lens.
Complementing his book for professionals, here Scott Shannon equips parents and caregivers with a better way to understand the mental health challenges their children face, including how cutting-edge scientific concepts like epigenetics and neuroplasticity mean new hope for overcoming them. Readers learn how the most common stressors in kids—inadequate nutrition, unaddressed trauma, learning problems, family relationships, and more—are often at the root of behavioral and emotional issues, and what steps can be taken to restore health and wholeness, without immediately turning to medication.
Shannon, Scott. Please Don’t Label My Child
From Publishers Weekly:
Pediatric psychiatrist Shannon, former president of the American Holistic Medical Association, and coauthor Heckman make the sobering observation that if the rate of increase in the use of childhood psychiatric medications continues at its current pace, within a generation half of all American children will be on some kind of psychiatric drug. Shannon argues that physicians are over-diagnosing and misdiagnosing a number of disorders, most notably ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), creating an undesirable doctor-diagnosis-drug cycle.
Shannon lists six external forces or brain stressors that can affect a child’s emotional and behavioral health (relational, nutritional, familial, environmental, educational and traumatic). He explores how emotional and cognitive brain growth are interrelated, outlining the elements needed for optimal brain development such as a safe and secure home life, love and touch, and proper nutrition. He also casts a critical eye on the educational system and what he believes is a one-size-fits-all, didactic approach. Claiming that labels can cripple rather than liberate, Shannon presents a convincing case for digging deeply into a child’s nutritional needs, sleep habits, home and school environment and other underlying issues before turning to meds.
Sinaikin, Phillip. Psychiatryland: How To Protect Yourself from Pill-Pushing Psychiatrists and Develop a Personal Plan for Optimal Mental Health
Have you ever sought professional help for an emotional problem and were shocked to find yourself diagnosed as mentally ill? Are you being pressured to take psychiatric medications by a doctor who barely listens to you?
If you are one of the millions of consumers of professional mental healthcare in America today, the answer to both questions is most likely yes—and it’s just as likely the treatment isn’t working. In Psychiatryland, Dr. Phillip Sinaikin teaches you why mental healthcare in America has come to be totally dominated by the so-called medical model of mental illness and how this can be dangerous to both your mental and physical health. Geared toward consumers, Sinaikin shows that psychiatry as it is practiced today is not a progressive medical science, but rather a multibillion-dollar business, run for profit by pharmaceutical companies, the insurance industry, and mainstream psychiatry.
Smail, David. Power, Interest and Psychology
Therapeutic psychology suggests that we are essentially self-creating and able to heal ourselves emotionally. This view reflects the wishful thinking necessary for the success of consumer capitalism, but it does not reflect the way things are. Smail examines how our experience of ourselves and our conduct can be explained in terms of the social operation of power and interest.
Smail, David. Why Therapy Isn’t Working: And What To Do About It!
These four works re-issued in two volumes, form a synthesis of his theory and practice, together offering an understanding of the origins of psychological disorder and the therapy that will help or hinder it. They offer a welcome corrective for the psychology student or practitioner and an encouraging new overview for the general reader.
Sutherland, Patsy and Roy Moodley. Caribbean Healing Traditions: Implications for Health and Mental Health
As Caribbean communities become more international, clinicians and scholars must develop new paradigms for understanding treatment preferences and perceptions of illness. Despite evidence supporting the need for culturally appropriate care and the integration of traditional healing practices into conventional health and mental health care systems, it is unclear how such integration would function since little is known about the therapeutic interventions of Caribbean healing traditions.
Caribbean Healing Traditions: Implications for Health and Mental Health fills this gap. Drawing on the knowledge of prominent clinicians, scholars, and researchers of the Caribbean and the diaspora, these healing traditions are explored in the context of health and mental health for the first time, making Caribbean Healing Traditions an invaluable resource for students, researchers, faculty, and practitioners in the fields of nursing, counseling, psychotherapy, psychiatry, social work, youth and community development, and medicine.
Szasz, Thomas: The Manufacture of Madness
In this seminal work, Dr. Szasz examines the similarities between the Inquisition and institutional psychiatry. His purpose is to show “that the belief in mental illness and the social actions to which it leads have the same moral implications and political consequences as had the belief in witchcraft and the social actions to which it led.”
Szasz, Thomas. The Myth of Mental Illness
The most influential critique of psychiatry ever written, Thomas Szasz’s classic book revolutionized thinking about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices. By diagnosing unwanted behavior as mental illness, psychiatrists, Szasz argues, absolve individuals of responsibility for their actions and instead blame their alleged illness. He also critiques Freudian psychology as a pseudoscience and warns against the dangerous overreach of psychiatry into all aspects of modern life.
Tew, Jerry. Social Approaches to Mental Distress
This latest title in the BASW series sets out the values, theoretical understandings and research base which underpin a social approach to mental health. Exploring therapeutic approaches and recovery practice, this book offers a practical guide to inform all work related to mental distress.
Thomas, Philip. Psychiatry in Context: Experience, Meaning and Communities
This book examines the central role of contexts in understanding psychosis and distress. The contexts in which we all exist, historical, cultural, social, political, economic and interpersonal, shape and give meaning to our lives for good or for bad. Scientific research confirms how contexts of adversity such as trauma, abuse, and racism can lead to psychosis. Thomas argues that if we are to prioritize the role of values and ethics in mental health care we must engage actively with the contexts of patients’ lives rather than focus on the endlessly fruitless search for the biological origins of distress and increasingly technological approaches to its management.
After careful examination of the problems of psychiatric diagnosis, treatments, scientific models of madness, and neuroscience, Thomas goes on to demonstrate how contextual factors are central to mental distress. He proposes that the opportunities we have through narrative, to talk about our experiences and the contexts in which they are embedded, play a vital role in the task of making sense of our lives, in health, when distressed, or when overwhelmed by psychosis.
Timimi, Sami. A Straight Talking Introduction to Children’s Mental Health Problems
Rates of diagnosis of psychiatric disorders such as ADHD, and prescription of psychiatric drugs to children, have increased alarmingly. This book is an excellent introduction to the area for students and provides parents of children with mental health difficulties with all the information they need to make informed choices about a child’s treatment.
Timimi, Sami. Naughty Boys: Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD, and the Role of Culture
Boys in the West are being labeled as having psychiatric disorders, behavior problems and special educational needs, and are receiving psychiatric drugs in ever-greater numbers. In this book, Dr. Timimi argues that this crisis reflects a fundamental ambivalence that Western culture has toward children which affects boys in particular. Using material from diverse sources, the author shows how Western Society’s political, social and economic value system is bad for families and children, and how positive alternatives can be found in non-Western traditions.
Valenstein, Elliot. Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health
Over the last thirty years, there has been a radical shift in thinking about the causes of mental illness. The psychiatric establishment and the health care industry have shifted 180 degrees from blaming mother to blaming the brain as the source of mental disorders. Whereas experience and environment were long viewed as the root causes of most emotional problems, now it is common to believe that mental disturbances– from depression and anxiety to schizophrenia– are determined by brain chemistry. And many people have come to accept the broader notion that their very personalities are determined by brain chemistry as well.
In his award-winning, meticulously researched, and elegantly written history of psychosurgery, “Great and Desperate Cures”, Elliot Valenstein exposed the great injury to thousands of lives that resulted when the medical establishment embraced an unproven approach to mental illness. Now, in “Blaming the Brain” he exposes the many weaknesses inherent in the scientific arguments supporting the widely accepted theory that biochemical imbalances are the main cause of mental illness.
Wampold, Bruce. The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence For What Makes Psychotherapy Work
The second edition of The Great Psychotherapy Debate has been updated and revised to expand the presentation of the Contextual Model, which is derived from a scientific understanding of how humans heal in a social context and explains findings from a vast array of psychotherapies studies. This model provides a compelling alternative to traditional research on psychotherapy, which tends to focus on identifying the most effective treatment for particular disorders through emphasizing the specific ingredients of treatment. The new edition also includes a history of healing practices, medicine, and psychotherapy, an examination of therapist effects, and a thorough review of the research on common factors such as the alliance, expectations, and empathy.
Watters, Ethan. Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
The most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture across the globe has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters, but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself. American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
Whitaker, Robert. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation’s children. What is going on?
Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix “chemical imbalances” in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals.
Whitaker, Robert. Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world’s poorest countries. In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. The widespread use of lobotomies in the 1920s and 1930s gave way in the 1950s to electroshock and a wave of new drugs. In what is perhaps Whitaker’s most damning revelation, Mad in America examines how drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed their studies to prove that new antipsychotic drugs were more effective than the old, while keeping patients in the dark about dangerous side effects.
A haunting, deeply compassionate book—now revised with a new introduction—Mad in America raises important questions about our obligations to the mad, the meaning of “insanity,” and what we value most about the human mind.
Whitely, Martin. Speed Up & Sit Still: The Controversies of ADHD Diagnosis and Treatment
The Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) debate is an emotive issue that has been simmering in the medical and general community for years. Parents who decide to treat their children with ADHD medications and who welcome the changes in their child’s behavior have a heavy emotional investment in believing they are helping their children. But, for some time, there have been concerns about possible misdiagnosis and over-prescription of ADHD medications.
In the long term, are amphetamines and other psychotropic drugs good for inattentive and impulsive children? How robust is the medical evidence on the symptoms and diagnosis of ADHD? Are children being medicated with amphetamines for a disorder whose existence is open to debate? In Speed Up and Sit Still, author Martin Whitely dissects the issues around what he calls the ADHD industry and finds that his long journey through the ADHD debate has included many surprising twists and turns. He tackles both sides of the issue in clear readable language and finds that the ADHD debate, like an onion, has many layers.
Williams, Paris. Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in our Understanding of Psychosis
As the recovery research continues to accumulate, we find that the mainstream understanding of schizophrenia and psychosis has lost nearly all credibility:
* After over 100 years and billions of dollars spent on research looking for schizophrenia and other related psychotic disorders in the brain, we still have not found any substantial evidence that these disorders are actually caused by a brain disease.
* We have learned that full recovery from schizophrenia and other related psychotic disorders is not only possible but is surprisingly common.
* We’ve discovered that those diagnosed in the United States and other “developed” nations are much less likely to recover than those in the poorest countries of the world; furthermore, those diagnosed with a psychotic disorder in the West today may fare even worse than those so diagnosed over 100 years ago.