Cracking the Mind-Body Cipher Dr. Niall (Jock) McLaren is an Australian psychiatrist who uses philosophical analysis to show that modern psychiatry has no scientific basis. This startling conclusion dovetails neatly with the growing evidence that psychiatric drug treatment is crude and damaging. Needless to say, this message is not popular with mainstream psychiatrists. However, in this book, he shows how the principles of information processing give a formal theory of mind that generates a model of mental disorder as a psychological phenomenon.
This book shows...
How, for ideological reasons, modern philosophy misses the point of the duality of mind and body; How to resolve the mind-body problem using well-defined principles; Why the entire DSM project is doomed to fail; Why the ideas of Thomas Szasz have failed to influence psychiatry; Where we go from here. "The Mind Body Problem Explained is a thoughtful, insightful and provocative exploration of the nature of the human mind, and sets forth a powerful argument for rethinking the medical model of mental disorders. The current paradigm of psychiatric care has failed us, and Niall McLaren's book will stir readers to think of new possibilities."
--Robert B. Whitaker, author Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill "It is impossible to do justice to this ambitious, erudite, and intrepid attempt to dictate to psychiatry a new, 'scientifically-correct' model theory. The author offers a devastating critique of the shortcomings and pretensions of psychiatry, not least its all-pervasive, jargon-camouflaged nescience."
--Sam Vaknin, PhD, author Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited From Future Psychiatry Press www.FuturePsychiatry.com MED105000 Medical: Psychiatry - General
PHI026000 Philosophy: Criticism
PSY018000 Psychology: Mental Illness
Niall (Jock) McLaren is an Australian psychiatrist with long experience in remote area psychiatry in the far north of the country. He graduated in psychiatry in Western Australia in 1977 and, while working in the state prison psychiatric service, began training in philosophy. He was interested in finding the correct theoretical basis for a "scientific" theory for psychotherapy. This has led him to the conclusion that modern psychiatry fails as science because it has no agreed model of mental disorder. To fill the theoretical gap, he has developed a dualist model of mind, based in the the work of the mathematicians Alan Turing and Claude Shannon. This work, now known as the biocognitive theory of mind, produced a general theory of mind for psychiatry. It generates a formal model of mental disorder as a primary psychological disturbance in a healthy brain, and predicts that mental disorder is not due to "chemical imbalances of the brain." It challenges orthodox psychiatry on many points but is emphatically not a new sort of "antipsychiatry" Learn more about Niall McLaren, M.D. at www.FuturePsychiatry.com
