Psychiatry Reconsidered From Medical Treatment to Supportive Understanding

Psychiatry suffers a lot of criticism, not least from within its own scientifically founded medical world. Much of this can be understood as a consequence of trying to force the round pegs of unhappiness, fear, confusion and distress into the square hole of medical science. This book provides an account of mental health difficulties and how they are generally addressed in conventional medical circles, alongside critical reviews of the assumptions underpinning them. The lack of scientific justification for medical treatments is explained and psychotherapies, although often helpful, are shown to be largely so because they offer a healing relationship, rather than because they convey expertise in one or another of the many psychotherapeutic techniques. These inescapable conclusions have profound implications for how mental health difficulties might be better considered and provided for. They encourage approaches that focus much more upon social and humanitarian perspectives, than scientific ones.

Hugh Middleton has been an NHS Consultant Psychiatrist for more than twenty years. He is also an academic who teaches medical students and trainee doctors. His research has spanned the fields of psychopharmacology, cognitive behaviour therapy, mental health services research, team working and critical perspectives. He is Co-chair of the UK Critical Psychiatry Network.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. ICD Chapter V and DSM. Cataloguing Mental Illness
2. Misunderstandings of 'Diagnosis'
3. Psychopharmacology: The Medicines of Psychiatry
4. Psychopharmacology Reconsidered
5. 'Psychotherapy'
6. Public Service Psychiatry As It Really Is
7. All In The Mind
8. So What Can Be Learned?
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