Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Really Any Good? - Hardcover

Bentall, Richard P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814791484 ISBN 13: 9780814791486

Publisher: NYU Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.
Arguing passionately for a future of mental health treatment that focuses as much on patients as individuals as on the brain itself, this is a book set to redefine our understanding of the treatment of madness in the twenty-first century.

About this title

About the Author

Richard P. Bentall is professor of clinical psychology at the University of Bangor in Wales. He has held chairs in clinical psychology at the universities of Liverpool and Manchester. Known internationally for his research into the causes and treatment of severe mental illness, he is also the author of the award-winning book Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature.

Reviews

Clinical and research psychologist Bentall (Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature) studies the effectiveness of different treatments for schizophrenic and bipolar disorders. In this thorough research overview, Bentall concludes that the "medical approach" is "fatally flawed," and "the way that psychiatric drugs are used needs to change radically." In his view, most psychiatric diagnoses fail at predicting the outcome of treatment, particularly drug treatment, because they are based upon faulty assumptions about the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders and a false distinction between schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Bentall looks at treatment practices and their study over the past century, particularly in the U.K., including a critical examination of twin studies that improperly claim a correlation between the mental health of parents and their adopted children, and in-depth analysis of recent studies that falsely attribute positive effects to anti-psychotic drug treatment while misrepresenting harmful side-effects. This controversial book makes an important contribution to the broader health-care debate regarding mental health and the role of the pharmaceutical industry.
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Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814791484
• ISBN 13: 9780814791486
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 388