People Not Psychiatry

Originally published in 1973, this book is about people and psychiatry. About people who rejected psychiatry as it was generally practised at the time, people who sought for and found alternative ways of caring for and healing one another. The author, who had been active in radical alternatives to psychiatry for some time, offers us a programme based not on drugs, repression and a ‘questionable’ expertise, but on human caring, greater awareness of the body, deeper communication between persons and a willingness to let the emotions flow. It is a challenging alternative which came at a time when the viability of scientific, theoretical and chemical approaches to distress were being questioned at all levels of society. This alternative includes the new direct methods of healing (making whole) such as Encounter, Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Psychofantasy – methods that do not do things to people but allow them to feel their way into change through experiment, flow and choice. The main focus of the book is People, not Psychiatry (PNP), the network set up by the author in 1969. PNP is open to all, and people in it help one another in times of stress and crisis, if they are asked to and when they are needed. One of the main assets of these networks is that they are an alternative and they are there. The book tells the story of PNP’s birth and growth. It is a personal story, a moving story, a story about people. In addition, the book contains some lively theoretical discussion, both simple and clear, in the course of which the author tentatively offers his own theory of neurosis – that many people become victims of the primitive logic patterns laid down in infancy, patterns that become reinforced through fear and habit and have to be dissolved or replaced if we are to enjoy a full, healthy, free-flowing life. The book is directed at doctors, patients, consultants, nurses, psychologists, social workers, therapists, in fact anyone involved in any way in the field of psychiatry. It is also offered to all those whom psychiatry touches, that it to say – everyone.

“The landmark book that argued that psychiatry consistently expands its definition of mental illness to impose its authority over moral and cultural conflict.” — New York Times The 50th anniversary edition of the most influential critique of psychiatry every written, with a new preface on the age of Prozac and Ritalin and the rise of designer drugs, plus two bonus essays. 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.

As this bestseller predicted, Trump has only grown more erratic and dangerous as the pressures on him mount. This new edition includes new essays bringing the book up to date—because this is still not normal. Originally released in fall 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was a runaway bestseller. Alarmed Americans and international onlookers wanted to know: What is wrong with him? That question still plagues us. The Trump administration has proven as chaotic and destructive as its opponents feared, and the man at the center of it all remains a cipher. Constrained by the APA’s “Goldwater rule,” which inhibits mental health professionals from diagnosing public figures they have not personally examined, many of those qualified to weigh in on the issue have shied away from discussing it at all. The public has thus been left to wonder whether he is mad, bad, or both. The prestigious mental health experts who have contributed to the revised and updated version of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump argue that their moral and civic "duty to warn" supersedes professional neutrality. Whatever affects him, affects the nation: From the trauma people have experienced under the Trump administration to the cult-like characteristics of his followers, he has created unprecedented mental health consequences across our nation and beyond. With eight new essays (about one hundred pages of new material), this edition will cover the dangerous ramifications of Trump's unnatural state. It’s not all in our heads. It’s in his.

Mind Fixers tells the history of psychiatry’s quest to understand the biological basis of mental illness and asks where we need to go from here. In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds. But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry into a state of crisis that a new “biological revolution” was meant to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science, and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis in our own time. Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Government programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, industry profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the story as well. In focusing particularly on the search for the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high human stakes for the millions of people who have sought medical answers for their mental suffering. This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones. A clear-eyed, evenhanded, and yet passionate tour de force, Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future, both for those who suffer and for those whose job it is to care for them.

"Between Sanity and Madness: Mental Illness from Homer to Neuroscience traces the extensive array of answers that various groups have provided to questions about the nature of mental illness and its boundaries with sanity. What distinguishes mental illnesses from other sorts of devalued conditions and from normality? Should medical, religious, psychological, legal, or no authority at all respond to the mentally ill? Why do some people become mad? What treatments might help them recover? Despite general agreement across societies regarding definitions about the pole of madness, huge disparities exist on where dividing lines should be placed between it and sanity and even if there is any clear demarcation at all. Various groups have provided answers to these puzzles that are both widely divergent and surprisingly similar to current understandings"--

“Gary Greenberg has become the Dante of our psychiatric age, and the DSM-5 is his Inferno.” —Errol Morris 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.

Bringing together treatment and referral advice from existing guidelines, this text aims to improve access to services and recognition of common mental health disorders in adults and provide advice on the principles that need to be adopted to develop appropriate referral and local care pathways.

Phil Fennell's tightly argued study traces the history of treatment of mental disorder in Britain over the last 150 years. He focuses specifically on treatment of mental disorder without consent within psychiatric practice, and on the legal position which has allowed it. Treatment Without Consent examines many controversial areas: the use of high-strength drugs and Electro Convulsive Therapy, physical restraint and the vexed issue of the sterilisation of people with learning disabilities. Changing notions of consent are discussed, from the common perception that relatives are able to consent on behalf of the patient, to present-day statutory and common law rules, and recent Law Commission recommendations. This work brings a complex and intriguing area to life; it includes a table of legal sources and an extensive bibliography. It is essential reading for historians, lawyers and all those who are interested in the treatment of mental disorder.