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Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good

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James Davies, with a PhD in social and medical anthropology from Oxford, begins with a history of psychiatry starting in the 1970s and a crisis of confidence it faced. A series of experiments questioned the validity and reliability of psychiatric diagnosis. I found it at times got too "sensational" and less rational (as a book like this should be), relying on rhetoric and emotions. Although this review has criticised the use of psychiatric drugs, I myself and many others have taken these medications for years. They are not easy to withdraw from, and anyone who wants to stop taking medications should approach doing so with extreme caution and preferably professional support. But there is an array of information out there on how to approach withdrawing.

Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good

So the illnesses defined in the DSM are deeply suspect and the criteria used to define them are deeply suspect but worse, the DSM has led to a situation where the drug companies have medicalised the illnesses and produced drugs to treat these "illnesses". c) The training of future psychiatrists must install greater awareness of psychiatry's scientific failings and current excesses as well as how to manage patients outside the medical model. 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. I surely cannot recommend this book. To read books that take down psychiatry, I would instead read something more like the following:Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan (excellent takedown of fads in psychiatry/ how therapy can make things worse) The theory is that the psychiatric illness is caused by some sort of imbalance in brain chemistry and the drugs will correct this imbalance. However, the imbalance has never been shown to exist. Even in the case of depression the evidence is pretty clear ...as the following citation indicates: For these individuals, there has become an imbalance in provision, with so many offered medical interventions versus talking therapies and social psychological provision, which may better facilitate meaningful change and recovery. James Davies’ timely expose of the psychiatry industry makes for fascinating and thought-provoking reading. Using his insider knowledge to illustrate for a general readership how psychiatry has put riches and medical status above patients’ well-being, Davies shows a real flair for the polemic, as well as a real sympathy for the senstivity of the subject.”

James Davies’ “Cracked, the Unhappy Truth About Notes from James Davies’ “Cracked, the Unhappy Truth About

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). Atlantic have bought UK & Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) in Dr James Davies’s The New Opium:Capitalism, Mental Health and the Sedation of a Nation. The book argues governments now are more preoccupied with sedating us, depoliticising our discontent and keeping us productive and subservient to the economic status quo, than with understanding and solving the real roots of our emotional despair. Being a young medic who will very soon find himself in the chair making referrals to psychiatry and psychotherapy, I considered myself having a deep personal stake in reading what Davies had to say. And I am glad that Davies puts forth his case so convincingly. Being a medical trainee who devoured every moment of soaking every word of psychology at A-Levels where utterly disparate models of human behaviour could co-exist in a curriculum, I went on to get completely disillusioned after reading psychiatry with its all-explained-through biology model taught during medical school. We provide health and wellbeing services, financial guidance and support to develop your study skills. You will also have access to careers advice, work placements, paid and voluntary work opportunities and career mentoring. Within the book, Dr Davies argues the widespread medicalisation of mental distress has fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Many who are diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric medication are not suffering from biologically identifiable problems. Instead, they are experiencing the understandable and, of course, painful human consequences of life’s difficulties – family breakdowns, problems at work, unhappiness in relationships, low self-esteem.Essentially, my take on this book is that the author points a dammning finger at the psychiatric profession and the drug companies that support them. James Davies is a qualified psychotherapist and has worked with the British NHS. He has a Phd in medical and social anthropology (whatever that actually is). Well I actually googled his thesis and found an interesting interview with him (see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/bl...) and this is what he has to say about his thesis:

Cracked - Icon Books

It has taken me a while to get around to writing this review because I felt that I needed time to do it justice. In many ways this is a scary book and I feel that I might need to read something that puts the other side of the story to really feel that I have a reasonable grasp of the issues. 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. 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. Everytime we take a pill for something there will be consequences of some sort as it is not a natural way to treat our bodies. Our job is to determine whether the consequence of the drug is worse than the initial problem. The scandal is that we are often not informed about the potential consequence or alternative approaches which may be more effective and less harmful. 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)

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 utter greed of the bankers who caused the financial crash in 2008 is now mirrored by the greed of big corporations who are raising prices exponentially while wages stagnate. It is that same greed for profits in the pharmaceutical corporations that is failing psychiatry today and all who suffer from the system as patients. The utter corruption we are witnessing today in Government and in big business has also undermined the idea that psychiatry can be trusted to be scientific. For myself, the experience of being held in a psychiatric unit was in itself a source of distress, and just being given tablets to cure me was dehumanising. It ignored my very human experiences and suffering. Instead I felt like some sort of broken object, sat waiting to be fixed like a car that needs its spark plugs changing. It’s almost laughable now to think of those endless ward rounds when the psychiatrists would scratch their heads and wonder why my depression hadn’t lifted. But all they would consider doing would be to give me more tablets. I went years without being able to swim in the sea or listen to an orchestra, and I certainly never felt I was treated with respect. I recovered after many years, and countless tablets and treatments, when somebody decided to talk to me and listen.

Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good - Goodreads

The DSM has gone through a number of editions and each time numbers of "new" mental illnesses have been added to the book (82 new illnesses from DSM3 to DSM4). So what are all these "new" mental illnesses. 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. It is exposed this week in a new book that should be read by every doctor, and also by everyone in politics and the media, not to mention any concerned citizen.”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". This is an excellent book...(it) careens, almost literally, from one psychiatric outrage to the next...I strongly recommend this book."

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