Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good

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At what point does the medicalization begin to undermine the health of the population? At what point does it begin to turn what should be a matter for spiritual, philosophical or political understanding and action into an issue that can be managed by medicine alone?’ (p.43). I surely cannot recommend this book. To read books that take down psychiatry, I would instead read something more like the following: After decades of trying to prove [the chemical imbalance theory], researchers have still come up empty-handed.’ I've read several books that incorporate or focus on the issues in psychiatry, but this is definitely among my favourites. The book is thought provoking, easy to read, and it challenges what you think we know about psychiatry. I wouldn't say I am convinced by everything in the book, but it certainly brought to light just how far removed psychological research is from the way it is practiced with patients and understood by the public. Kandel’s book is a nobel prize winner's memoir that spans from his Jewish childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna to his work on sea slugs that uncovered synaptic plasticity, the molecular foundation of learning and memory. When I graduated college, every neuroscience major was given a copy of this book.

Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good

Davies goes on to describe in Chapter 6 how psychiatric drugs can change a person’s personality in a way that the person themselves may not recognise. He explains how antidepressants are not returning us to health but they ‘rather manufacture a new state of mind, and often an unnatural state’ (p.99). In my own experience, I have witnessed friends who are heavily medicated with psychiatric drugs who can seem like an empty shell of the person I had known. I think this is a really important book. As Peter Hitchens (Mail on Sunday) put it...this "Should be read by every doctor....by everyone in politics and the media, not to mention any concerned citizen". I can’t urge the reading of this book strongly enough. Anyone who cares about what it means to be a fully human being, and especially anyone involved in any way in the caring professions needs to be aware of what Davies lays clear about the mental health industry. For industry it surely is. Dr James Davies, Reader in our Departments of Psychology and Life Sciences, has published a book investigating the vast increase in mental health interventions since the 1980s, despite there being no clear improvement in clinical outcomes over the last four decades. James Davies gained his PhD in social and medical anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2006. He is also a qualified psychotherapist, who has worked in organisations such as the NHS. James is a Reader in social anthropology and mental health at the University of Roehampton, London. He has published four academic books for presses like Stanford University Press and Routledge, and has delivered talks at many universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Brown, CUNY (New York), and The New School (New York). James has also written for The Times, The Guardian, The New Scientist and Salon. He is the co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, now secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence.As a scientific venture, the theory that low serotonin causes depression appears to be on the verge of collapse. This is as it should be; the nature of science is ultimately to be selfcorrecting. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power. In recent years such disproving research has begun to erode the profession’s faith in the chemical imbalance theory. This has led increasing numbers of prominent figures in the mental health profession to declare their defection publicly. To pique your interest in this sea -change, here are a few quotations I’ve managed to gather: The RSP president argues that the current methods enable them to get mental health funding. The DSM people that they expect users, somewhat Biblically, to make their own interpretations rather than taking the DSM literally. The latter seems a general issue in anything to do with personality and social policy – people using questionnaires and methods literally; not finding out who the person/s are before making decisions about them. You can add your own here.

James Davies publishes new book “Sedated: How Modern Dr James Davies publishes new book “Sedated: How Modern

In Britain, approaching a quarter of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in a year, an increase of over 500% since 1980. Despite this rise in prescriptions, the prevalence of mental health problems and disability have also increased. Exposé of the practices of contemporary psychiatry and its uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous, relationship with pharmaceutical companies who profit from an increasingly medicated public. This citation seems academically sloppy and perhaps shows that Davies seeks to oversimplify a complex and murky issue into a one-sided story (though this also might reflect my innate bias against pop-science books). Chapter 1 ends questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnoses even if we fix the reliability problem. Even if we could get every psychiatrist to agree on the diagnoses, does that mean it’s a real disease entity, or that we’ve just made a reliable but arbitrary construct? He argues that we need biomarkers to prove it’s a “discrete, identifiable biological disease.” While I agree, I think that psychiatric definitions do a good job of separating normal but different from disease, by often requiring that the disease is disruptive to the patients social relationships or occupational function. What makes psychiatric illnesses, diseases is that they are problematic for people’s lives, and people, whether the patient themselves or their friends and family, want something done about it. I’m unsure if we will be able to find or need to find biomarkers for every disease. While some diagnoses may ultimately be arbitrary, if they are clinically helpful and can show statistical and long-term improvements in patients quality of life, then they are valuable.Davies also writes about the conflicts of interest that have become endemic to the field recently. Namely, a large number of medical professionals, universities, and medical associations collect bountiful fees from large pharmaceutical companies; in the form of pro-drug speaking fees, donations, consultancy work, and other assorted compensations and incentives for prescribing and advocating for these controversial medications. The book begins with a discussion of the DSM and its plausibility. Davies speaks with Robert Spitzer (a key figure in earlier versions) and others about the meaning and purpose of this diagnostic text and establishes that the categories within were not arrived at by research, but what seems to be a consensus of practitioners. Later he talks with a prominent critic of the current DSM (5) with Allen Frances, who expresses his view that many normal behaviours are now being pathologised. I've read Frances' book Saving Normal, on this topic, and it appears in both instances that, for all the valid points he makes, Frances is unable to put himself outside the thought of his profession. Author James Davies obtained his PhD in medical and social anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is also a qualified psychotherapist (having worked in the NHS), and a senior lecturer in social anthropology and psychology at the University of Roehampton, London. He has delivered lectures at many universities, including Harvard, Brown, CUNY, Oxford and London, and has written articles about psychiatry for the New Scientist, Therapy Today and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. I will say.. One concept that stood out to me was the difference between the disease-centered model and the drug-centered model. James Davies quotes Dr. Joanna Moncrieff as she explains the difference, “In the disease-centred model, people are assumed to have a mental disease, a problem in their brain. And drugs are thought to be effective because they rectify or reverse that underlying brain problem in some way… But the drug-centred model… rather emphasises that drugs are drugs; they are chemical substances that are foreign to the human body but which affect the way people think and feel. They have psychoactive properties, just like recreational drugs do, which alter the way the body functions at a physiological level.” (103)