Doctoring the Mind

by Bentall, Richard P.

• ISBN13: 9780814791486
• ISBN10: 0814791484
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
List of Figures	p. viii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
Preface: Rational Antipsychiatry	p. xi
An Illusion of Progress
A Smashing Success?	p. 3
The Appliance of Science: The Emergence of Psychiatry as a Medical Discipline	p. 26
Therapeutic Innovation at the End of the Asylum Era	p. 42
Dissent and Resolution: The Triumph of Biological Psychiatry	p. 69
Three Myths about Mental Illness
People or Plants? The Myth that Psychiatric Diagnoses are Meaningful	p. 89
The Fundamental Error of Psychiatry: The Myth that Psychiatric Disorders are Genetic Diseases	p. 113
Brains, Minds and Psychosis: The Myth that Mental Illnesses are Brain Diseases	p. 148
Medicine for Madness
Science, Profit and Politics in the Conduct of Clinical Trials	p. 185
Less is Probably Better: The Benefits and Costs of Antipsychotics	p. 214
The Virtue of Kindness: Is Psychotherapy Effective for Severe Mental Illness?	p. 242
What Kind of Psychiatry Do You Want?	p. 262
Notes	p. 289
Index	p. 351
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