Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good

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There are many advances to pick from but this author was not interested in providing his reader with the latest advances *and* the problems that plague psychiatry. While some of these medications have their uses and offer some people a level of comfort (placebo or otherwise); their usage should be heavily weighed on a cost/benefit analysis. Instead I felt like some sort of broken object, sat waiting to be fixed like a car that needs its spark plugs changing.

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

Furthermore, his keenness throughout the book to keep referring to mental illness as 'perfectly normal human reactions' made me quite sad, because who is he to trivialise the suffering of people who are quite literally crippled by depression, social anxiety, schizophrenia?However, the sense of being put into an asylum (even without the insurmountable walls of asylum imagery) haunts us in our experience of Mehendipur. Well, Spitzer found that after his reforms psychiatrists were now disagreeing around 33 to 46 per cent of the time – results indicating the very opposite of diagnostic improvement. They help us explain why psychiatrists were not only guilty of branding sane people as insane (as the Rosenhan experiment revealed), but also guilty of regularly failing to agree on what diagnosis to assign a given patient (as the ‘diagnostic reliability’ experiments showed).

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

Dr Davies is co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, which is now secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence. When Davies interviewed consultant psychiatrist Pat Bracken, he stated that: ‘Capitalism can only continue by constantly making us dissatisfied with our lives’ (p. 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.

Although this review has criticised the use of psychiatric drugs, I myself and many others have taken these medications for years. For example, you’ll remember that I said before Spitzer’s DSM-III two psychiatrists would give different diagnoses to the same patient 32 per cent to 42 per cent of the time. I began reading this book in an attempt to understand my own extremely painful experiences in the mental-health services.