"A provocative and revealing perspective.” - Booklist
Shows how mental distress is often caused by relationship imbalance, not chemical imbalance.
Diagnosis Human offers a compelling alternative to the biomedical model of mental health as it’s been promoted over the last 30 years--a model which says that mental distress is a problem of chemical imbalance, or brain chemistry. Promoted by the highly profitable Psychiatry/Pharmaceutical industrial complex, and followed by much of the broader psychotherapy community, biological psychiatry focuses on quantifying the “illness” by an almost exclusive focus on symptoms. In this model, symptoms are never good. They are always seen as a sign that something is wrong with that person, a sign of pathology that must be changed. People now have a name for what they “have” and receive a prescription for it.
What may appear as intractable individual problems, however, often aren’t individual problems at all. This book reveals how many of these distressing emotional states are created by nearly invisible, intimate patterns in our relationships. Diagnosis: Human invites readers into the therapist’s office to be part of family therapy sessions, where they can experience practically first-hand what these intimate relationship patterns look and feel like. The authors present cases of adults dealing with depression, couples who come to therapy reeling from the betrayal of an affair, families with kids diagnosed with ADHD, teenagers with anxiety or young children with temper tantrums. Each therapy session includes the voice of the therapist, inviting readers to sit in as observers to watch and listen as the case unfolds, sometimes in dramatic fashion.
Amy Begel is a family therapist who received her family therapy training over 30 years ago with one of the creators of family therapy, Dr. Salvador Minuchin. Since then, she has maintained a busy private practice in New York City. Until 2011 Amy was Senior Faculty at The Minuchin Center for the Family where she conducted family therapy training nationally and internationally. In addition to her clinical practice in family therapy, Amy is on the teaching faculty of both the Department of Family Practice, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Department of Internal Medicine and Cardiology at Maimonides Medical Center where she trains resident physicians in looking at relationship dynamics in the context of medical care. Amy has authored numerous professional articles and posts, including the Psychotherapy Networker, the popular medical blog KevinMD, and HuffPost. She writes the blog Most Human. She lives in Teaneck, New Jersey.
David Keith is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York. He has been in practice for 45 years. He was on the Psychiatry faculty at Wisconsin for eight years, then entered private practice for five years with the Family Therapy Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was at the University Wisconsin that Dave met Carl Whitaker, MD, considered to be one of the important forefathers of the Family Therapy movement. He became a co-therapist, co-author and therapeutic collaborator with Dr. Whitaker, working with him for over 20 years. Dave is board certified in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Dave has published 22 book chapters and 31 papers. He coauthored Defiance in the Family: Finding Hope in Therapy (2001), and he co-edited Family Therapy as an Alternative to Medication: An Appraisal of Pharmland (2003). He is the author of Continuing the Experiential Approach of Carl Whitaker: Process, Practice & Magic (2015). He lives in Manlius, New York.
