DOCSLIB.ORG

Draft Manifesto for a Social Materialist Psychology of Distress

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Draft Manifesto for a Social Materialist Psychology of Distress DRAFT MANIFESTO FOR A SOCIAL MATERIALIST PSYCHOLOGY OF DISTRESS Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy 12,2: 93-107 (2012) THE MIDLANDS PSYCHOLOGY GROUP John Cromby Bob Diamond Paul Kelly Paul Moloney Penny Priest David Smail Jan Soffe-Caswell Numbers in square brackets [p.xx] refer to page numbers in the published version. In this version we have corrected some minor errors that crept into the version published in the JCPCP (including an error in the attribution of authorship). CONTACT: [email protected] [p.93]Draft Manifesto for a Social Materialist Psychology of Distress ABSTRACT This paper explains the shared background and working practices of the authors; identifies the main assumptions of a social materialist psychology; and sets out a manifesto showing what it might mean to consider distress from a social materialist perspective. INTRODUCTION What follows is aimed in part, but not exclusively, at people in the ‘psy’ professions who seldom have any other vocabulary with which to talk about these issues - outside of psychiatry, on the one hand, and talking therapy on the other. The article marshals a wide range of theory and research on the kinds of misery that get treated by mental health professionals. We are a group of psychologists: clinical, counselling and academic. We have been meeting regularly since 2003. We call ourselves social materialist psychologists. This is not necessarily a formally worked-out philosophical stance. Most psychology is individual and idealist. It takes the individual as a given unit of analysis, and treats the social as a somewhat optional and often uniform context. And, in what is still at root a Cartesian move, it treats the material world as straightforwardly present, but simultaneously subordinate to the immaterial cognitions by which we reflect upon it. It is by contrast to this that our psychology is social materialist. Social because we affirm the primacy of the social, of collectivity, relationality and community, because we acknowledge that individuals are thoroughly social: ontogenetically, in their origins, and continuously and non-optionally during their existence. And material because we acknowledge that the cognitions by which we reflect upon the world do not simply float free of its affordances, character and properties. Cognition is both social and material, rooted in the ring-fenced metacognitive resources we have acquired, the embodied capacities it recruits, and the resources and subjective possibilities our world supplies (Johnson, 2007; Tolman, 1994; Vygotsky, 1962). By social materialist psychology, then, we do not mean to imply a mere inverse reflection of the mainstream, a negation, a futile rush to its polar opposite. Individuals exist, but their experiences are thoroughly social, at the [p.94 ]very same time as they are singular and personal. And cognitions occur, but their relation to the material world is neither determinate nor arbitrary. Our social materialist psychology is therefore aligned – in sentiment, if not content – with other contemporary initiatives that similarly refuse the naive separations of individual and social, experience and materiality: psychosocial studies, studies of subjectivity, process philosophy, the turns to language and to affect. In each of these perspectives (and more besides) we find resources, echoes and inspirations. We write as we act: collectively. In this, we align ourselves with a tradition of psychologists (Curt, 1994), political theorists and activists (The Free Association, 2011), writers and artists (Home, 1991) who reject in practice the notion that ideas are simply the achievement of individuals. At a moment when collectivity, solidarity and mutual trust are so sorely needed, this simple act may take on significances beyond the pages within which it appears. This manifesto is unfinished, a work in progress, a direction rather than a destination. We hope you find the ideas useful. Moreover, it may inspire you to join with like-minded others, to spend time sharing ideas and interests as we continue to do. 1. Persons are primordially social and material beings Before anything else, we are feeling bodies in a social world (Csordas, 1994; Merleau-Ponty, 2002; Schutz, 1970). Primordially, experience consists of a continuous flux of bodily feedback, or feeling. This feedback – which is the raw stuff of consciousness itself (Damasio, 1999) – reflects our embodied, material situation (hot, tired, hurting etc). It situates us in a particular setting, and furnishes an ongoing sense of our bodily potentials: an embodiment. This feedback is also continuously social (influenced by the changing social relations of the lived moment) and socialised (somewhat habitual, shaped by the impress of prior experience). Bodily feedback, in the form of feelings, is the most elemental stuff of our being human. However, the ineffability of the body means that the centrality of feeling often eludes reflection (Langer, 1967). Consequently, the most prominent component of thought itself is frequently what Vygotsky (1962) called inner speech. This running commentary on our own and others’ actions has social origins: its cognitive aspects are secondary to the social, discursive relations that engendered it. It is also largely retrospective, serving to stabilise or represent what has just occurred. In doing so it can serve as a tool to guide our own (and others’) actions, and in this way have some relatively limited influence on future circumstances. Bodily, despite our somewhat fuzzy edges, we are discrete individuals. But this individuality is relationally and socially produced: ontogenetically, in the fusion of egg and sperm; developmentally, in the experience-dependent construction of important neural assemblies (Schore, 2001); and psychologically, through relations and interactions that inculcate the implicit [p.95]habits and beliefs of selfhood. Because social relations shape our being, experience is not only specific to a particular trajectory of relational and familial social participation, it is also reflective of our epoch (Elias, 1978), class (Bourdieu, 1984) gender (Fine, 2010; Young, 1990) and – no doubt – other important social divisions. This is not a denial of individuality. No-one else will occupy precisely the same circumstances as you, with exactly the constellation of bodily capacities with which you are endowed: for this reason, we are each unique. But this uniqueness is constituted from elements of the same flesh, the same social relations, the same material organisations of tools, objects, locations and institutions, the same cultural resources, artefacts and norms, the same discursive signs and symbols. Uniqueness and individuality are thoroughly social and material accomplishments. 2. Distress arises from the outside inwards Distress is not the consequence of inner flaws or weaknesses. All mainstream approaches to ‘therapy’ locate the origin of psychological difficulty within the individual, usually as some kind of idiosyncracy of past experience. A morally neutral ‘normality’ may thus be seen as having become ‘neurotically’ distorted via, for example, unconscious personal desires or errors of personal judgment (e.g., over-generalization of negative experiences). Certainly this is the way we often experience our distress since such experience is inevitably interior. But experience and explanation are two very different things. Professional therapy tends to presume that both the causes and the experience of distress are interior, since this affords the therapist a legitimate ground of intervention: individuals can be worked on in ways that social and material circumstances cannot. Individuals thus quickly learn to see themselves as in some way personally defective when in fact their troubled experience arises from a defective environment (Smail, 2005). Neither is distress the consequence of cognitive errors, or failures to process information correctly. Those therapeutic approaches that do not attribute distress to some kind of personal emotional defect (however acquired) often point instead to ‘cognitive’ failure. The possibility that individuals, through no fault of their own, have drawn the wrong conclusions from unfortunate eventualities may at least have the advantage of absolving them from the odour of blame or personal shortcoming that tends often to waft around more ‘psychodynamic’ approaches. Again, this kind of view allows the therapist an apparently legitimate field of operation in re-working the person’s cognitive processes. It does so, however, at the expense of a truly convincing account of human learning. There is, surely, enough evidence of what a distressing place the world can be for us to avoid the necessity of concluding that the distress we experience is somehow mistaken (Smail, 2001a; 2005). So-called ‘individual differences’ in susceptibility to distress are largely the consequences of prior socialization. The fact that some of us seem to survive [p.96] adverse experience unscathed while others are thrown into confusion or despair may be taken as pointing to ‘interior’, personal qualities: ‘self-esteem’, ‘willpower’, or most recently ‘resilience’. However, it is far easier, and more credible, to point to the embodied advantages someone has acquired over time from the social/material environment than it is to postulate essentially mysterious and unanalysable personal qualities that originate from within. To mistake the gifts of providence for personal virtues is an all-too-common
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Mapping Coils of Paranoia in a Neocolonial Security State
    City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2016 Becoming Serpent: Mapping Coils of Paranoia in a Neocolonial Security State Rachel J. Liebert Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1286 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] BECOMING SERPENT: MAPPING COILS OF PARANOIA IN A NEOCOLONIAL SECURITY STATE By RACHEL JANE LIEBERT A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 RACHEL JANE LIEBERT All Rights Reserved ii BECOMING SERPENT: MAPPING COILS OF PARANOIA IN A NEOCOLONIAL SECURITY STATE By RACHEL JANE LIEBERT This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Psychology to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Michelle Fine Date Chair of Examining Committee Maureen O’Connor Date Executive Officer Michelle Fine Sunil Bhatia Cindi Katz Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Becoming Serpent: Mapping Coils of Paranoia in a Neocolonial Security State By Rachel Jane Liebert Advisor: Michelle Fine What follows is a feminist, decolonial experiment to map the un/settling circulation of paranoia – how it is done, what it does, what it could do – within contemporary conditions of US white supremacy.
    [Show full text]
  • Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry: History, Rhetoric and Reality
    2 (4) 2018 DOI: 10.26319/4717 Daniel Burston, Psychology Department, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh PA [email protected] Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry: History, Rhetoric and Reality Abstract: The term “anti-psychiatry” was coined in 1912 by Dr. Bernhard Beyer, but only popularized by Dr. David Cooper (and his critics) in the midst of a widespread cultural revolt against involuntary hospitalization and in-patient psychiatry during the 1960s and 1970s. However, with the demise of the old-fashioned mental hospital, and the rise of Big Pharma (with all its attendant evils), the term “anti-psychiatry” has outlived its usefulness. It survives merely as a term of abuse or a badge of honor, depending on the user and what rhetorical work this label is expected to perform. Those who use the term nowadays generally have a polemical axe to grind, and seldom understand the term’s origins or implications. It is time that serious scholars retire this term, or to restrict its use to R.D.Laing’s followers in the Philadelphia Associates and kindred groups that sprang up in the late 1960s and 1970s. Keywords: psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, psychoanalysis, DSM V, Big Pharma, normalization, psychopolitics On November 16, 2016, Dr. Bonnie Burstow, Associate Professor of Adult Education and Community Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto, launched the first (and thus far, only) scholarship in North America to support doctoral theses on the subject of “anti-psychiatry.” Predictably, this bold gesture garnered praise in some quarters, but provoked a barrage of criticism from both in and outside the university.
    [Show full text]
  • Anatomy of an Epidemic: Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
    Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 7, Number I , Spring 2005 Anatomy of an Epidemic: Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America Robert Whitaker Cambridge, MA Over the past 50 years, there has been an astonishing increase in severe mental illness in the United States . The percentage of Americans disabled by mental illness has increased fivefold since 1955, when Thorazine-remembered today as psychiatry's first "wonder" drug-was introduced into the market . The number of Americans disabled by mental ill- ness has nearly doubled since 1987, when Prozac-the first in a second generation of wonder drugs for mental illness-was introduced . There are now nearly 6 million Ameri- cans disabled by mental illness, and this number increases by more than 400 people each day. A review of the scientific literature reveals that it is our drug-based paradigm of care that is fueling this epidemic . The drugs increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill, and induce new and mote severe psychiatric symptoms in a significant percentage ofpatients. Keywords: antipsychotics; antidepressants ; mental illness; epidemic; schizophrenia he modern era of psychiatry is typically said to date back to 1955, when chlorpro- mazine, marketed as Thorazine, was introduced into asylum medicine . In 1955, T the number of patients in public mental hospitals reached a high-water mark of 558,922 and then began to gradually decline, and historians typically credit this empty- ing of the state hospitals to chlorpromazine . As Edward Shorter wrote in his 1997 book, A History of Psychiatry, "Chlorpromazine initiated a revolution in psychiatry, comparable to the introduction of penicillin in general medicine" (Shorter, 1997, p.
    [Show full text]
  • The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? by Marcia Angell
    Font Size: A A A The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? JUNE 23, 2011 Marcia Angell The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch Basic Books, 226 pp., $15.99 (paper) Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker Crown, 404 pp., $26.00 Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat Free Press, 256 pp., $25.00 It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created. An advertisement for Prozac, from The American A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by Journal of Psychiatry, 1995 the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives.
    [Show full text]
  • A New Model for Sustainable Mental Health I 1 UNIVERSITEIT TWENTE VOOR DOCENT VAN HET JAAR 2017
    NOMINATIE VAN DE A new model for sustainable mental health I 1 UNIVERSITEIT TWENTE VOOR DOCENT VAN HET JAAR 2017 Een docent die al meerdere malen tot beste docent bij zijn eigen opleiding is verkozen, altijd hele positieve studentbeoordelingen krijgt en afgelopen jaar ook nog eens de titel ‘Docent van het Jaar 2016’ van deERNST Universiteit TwenteT. BOHLMEIJER heeft ontvangen, verdient hetAND wat ons betreft ook om de ISO Docent van hetGERBEN Jaar 2017 award J. teWESTERHOF winnen. Daarom dragen wij met trots Martin van der Hoef voor, docent bij de bacheloropleiding scheikundige technologie, de masteropleiding chemical engineering en bij het University College Twente (ATLAS). Hij geeft onder andere de abstractere vakken thermodynamicaA enNEW quantummechanica MODEL (in de Bachelor) en fasenlee FORr (in de Master). LOOPBAAN tijd op onderwijs komen te liggen. Hiervoor Martin van der Hoef heeft zelf ook aan de heeft hij een goede wetenschappelijke carrière Universiteit TwenteSUSTAINABLE gestudeerd, Applied opgegeven (op het moment dat hij terug- Physics. Na zijn PhD te behalen en daaropvol- keerde naar Twente had Martin meer dan 50 gend een Postdoc aan de University of Oxford publicaties op zijn naam staan), om zich vrijwel gevolgd te hebben, is hij weer teruggekomen volledig op onderwijs te kunnen concentreren. naar Twente.MENTAL Als Associate Professor heeft HEALTHZelf noemt hij dit wellicht een ongebruikelijke Martin hier vervolgens 16 jaar gewerkt. Toen stap, maar hij heeft er nooit spijt van gehad. de hoogleraarINTEGRATING van zijn toenmalige WELL-BEING vakgroep INTODat PSYCHOLOGICALstudenten hier ook blij TREATMENT mee zijn, blijkt wel naar de TU Eindhoven vertrok is hij aanvanke- uit het feit dat hij drie keer de decentrale prijs lijk, samen met anderen, meegegaan.
    [Show full text]
  • Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness
    ABOLISHING THE CONCEPT OF MENTAL ILLNESS In Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness: Rethinking the Nature of Our Woes, Richard Hallam takes aim at the very concept of mental illness, and explores new ways of thinking about and responding to psychological distress. Though the concept of mental illness has infiltrated everyday language, academic research, and public policy-making, there is very little evidence that woes are caused by somatic dysfunction. This timely book rebuts arguments put forward to defend the illness myth and traces historical sources of the mind/body debate. The author presents a balanced overview of the past utility and current disadvantages of employing a medical illness metaphor against the backdrop of current UK clinical practice. Insightful and easy to read, Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness will appeal to all professionals and academics working in clinical psychology, as well as psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners. Richard Hallam worked as a clinical psychologist, researcher, and lecturer until 2006, mainly in the National Health Service and at University College London and the University of East London. Since then he has worked independently as a writer, researcher, and therapist. ABOLISHING THE CONCEPT OF MENTAL ILLNESS Rethinking the Nature of Our Woes Richard Hallam First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Richard Hallam The right of Richard Hallam to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
    [Show full text]
  • Wellness Forum Health Annual Symposium on Informed™ Medical Decision-Making Co-Sponsored By
    Wellness Forum Health Annual Symposium on InforMED™ Medical Decision-Making Co-sponsored by Dr. Peter Breggin’s Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy November 13-15 Columbus, Ohio Featured Speakers : Young Hee Ko, Ph.D. cancer researcher, founder of KoDiscovery (revolutionary cancer treatment) Dr. Hans Diehl, founder of the CHIP Program (Complete Health Improvement Program) Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic Garth Davis MD, author of Proteinaholic Special Event: an evening with David Katz MD author of How to Eat Saturday, November 15: dinner, an engaging ~talk by one of the most important doctors in lifestyle medicine, and a celebration of Wellness Forum Health’s 25th anniversary also featuring: Pam Popper, President WFH; Peter Breggin, M.D.; Eileen Kopsaftis, P.T.; Mary Marshall, RN; Beth Prier, PharmD, MS, CPHIMS Ticket prices: (register now to get the best price!) Nov 11, 2019-April 30, 2020 Member $299 Non-Member $359 May 1-June 30 Member $359 Non-Member $399 July 1-August 31 Member $379 Non-Member $410 September 1-October 31 Member $399 Non-Member $449 November 1-10 Member $449 Non-Member $499 (subject to availability) No partial tickets, non-transferrable and non-refundable. No registrations at the door. Ticket price includes: Main session lectures and interactive panel discussions Breakout sessions (see descriptions on following pages) Three meals: dinner on Friday, lunch on Saturday, multi-course dinner on Saturday (all meals are vegan, low-fat, & gluten free) Conference Hours: Fri 2:00-4:00PM
    [Show full text]
  • Antipsychiatry Movement 29 Wikipedia Articles
    Antipsychiatry Movement 29 Wikipedia Articles PDF generated using the open source mwlib toolkit. See http://code.pediapress.com/ for more information. PDF generated at: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:23:04 UTC Contents Articles Anti-psychiatry 1 History of anti-psychiatry 11 Involuntary commitment 19 Involuntary treatment 30 Against Therapy 33 Dialectics of Liberation 34 Hearing Voices Movement 34 Icarus Project 45 Liberation by Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry 47 MindFreedom International 47 Positive Disintegration 50 Radical Psychology Network 60 Rosenhan experiment 61 World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry 65 Loren Mosher 68 R. D. Laing 71 Thomas Szasz 77 Madness and Civilization 86 Psychiatric consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement 88 Mad Pride 96 Ted Chabasinski 98 Lyn Duff 102 Clifford Whittingham Beers 105 Social hygiene movement 106 Elizabeth Packard 107 Judi Chamberlin 110 Kate Millett 115 Leonard Roy Frank 118 Linda Andre 119 References Article Sources and Contributors 121 Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors 123 Article Licenses License 124 Anti-psychiatry 1 Anti-psychiatry Anti-psychiatry is a configuration of groups and theoretical constructs that emerged in the 1960s, and questioned the fundamental assumptions and practices of psychiatry, such as its claim that it achieves universal, scientific objectivity. Its igniting influences were Michel Foucault, R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and, in Italy, Franco Basaglia. The term was first used by the psychiatrist David Cooper in 1967.[1] Two central contentions
    [Show full text]
  • The Relationship Between Insurance Coverage And
    THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INSURANCE COVERAGE AND MENTAL ILLNESS TREATMENT by Jeanne M. Heinen, B.A. A thesis submitted to the Graduate Council of Texas State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts with a Major in Sociology August 2014 Committee Members: Toni Watt, Chair Patti Giuffre Ollie Seay COPYRIGHT by Jeanne M. Heinen 2014 FAIR USE AND AUTHOR’S PERMISSION STATEMENT Fair Use This work is protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States (Public Law 94-553, section 107). Consistent with fair use as defined in the Copyright Laws, brief quotations from this material are allowed with proper acknowledgment. Use of this material for financial gain without the author’s express written permission is not allowed. Duplication Permission As the copyright holder of this work I, Jeanne Heinen, authorize duplication of this work, in whole or in part, for educational or scholarly purposes only. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Toni Watt, my thesis chair and mentor, for her patient and professional guidance throughout my career as a student at Texas State as well as for her enthusiastic encouragement and useful critiques of this research project. I would also like to thank Dr. Patti Giuffre, for her advice and assistance in keeping my academic progress on schedule and for equipping me with tools to better my analytical thinking skills. Thank you to Dr. Ollie Seay for her contributions and constructive recommendations on this research. I wish to thank various people for their contribution to making my time at Texas State a memorable experience; Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Space, Politics, and the Uncanny in Fiction and Social Movements
    MADNESS AS A WAY OF LIFE: SPACE, POLITICS AND THE UNCANNY IN FICTION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Justine Lutzel A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2013 Committee: Ellen Berry, Advisor Francisco Cabanillas Graduate Faculty Representative Ellen Gorsevski William Albertini © 2013 Justine Lutzel All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Ellen Berry, Advisor Madness as a Way of Life examines T.V. Reed’s concept of politerature as a means to read fiction with a mind towards its utilization in social justice movements for the mentally ill. Through the lens of the Freudian uncanny, Johan Galtung’s three-tiered systems of violence, and Gaston Bachelard’s conception of spatiality, this dissertation examines four novels as case studies for a new way of reading the literature of madness. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House unveils the accusation of female madness that lay at the heart of a woman’s dissatisfaction with domestic space in the 1950s, while Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island offers a more complicated illustration of both post-traumatic stress syndrome and post-partum depression. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Curtis White’s America Magic Mountain challenge our socially- accepted dichotomy of reason and madness whereby their antagonists give up success in favor of isolation and illness. While these texts span chronology and geography, each can be read in a way that allows us to become more empathetic to the mentally ill and reduce stigma in order to effect change.
    [Show full text]
  • A Book Review
    Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 523-526, 2010 BOOK REVIEWS Opinion vs. Opinion A Review of: Doctoring the mind: Is our current treatment of mental illness really any good? By Richard P. Bentall New York University, 2009 There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. Hippocrates Today everyone knows someone who is ‘mentally ill,’ ‘possessed,’ ‘disturbed,’ ‘unhinged,’ or just plain ‘crazy.’ While past generations have been more open to all of these expressions, we have been taught to think only in terms of the first. Working hand in hand, the psychiatric and psychopharmacology establishments have indoctrinated us into the belief that any odd behaviour or unpleasant feeling is due to an illness of either neurobiological or genetic origin. A natural corollary is that drugs are the cure. Doctoring the Mind by Richard Bentall, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Manchester challenges this belief. After a cursory review of the history of psychiatry with a British slant, he systematically puts under scrutiny psychiatric diagnosis à la Kraeplin and then the DSM, psychiatric theories of genetic and brain factors, and psychiatric drugs. Pointing out methodological problems, statistical manipulations and faulty assumptions, he concludes that “the dominant paradigm in psychiatry, which assumes that mental illnesses are genetically influenced brain diseases, has been a spectacular failure.”(264, emphasis added) “Conventional psychiatry,” he declares, “has been profoundly unscientific and at the same time unsuccessful at helping some of the most distressed and vulnerable people in society.” (vx) His conclusion is convincing as it follows from a critique of psychiatry that appears to be based on a good knowledge of science and the proper interpretation of research results.
    [Show full text]
  • The Demonisation of Psychiatrists in Fiction (And Why Real Psychiatrists Might Want to Do Something About It) Jacqueline Hopson Psychiatric Bulletin 2014, 38:175-179
    EDUCATION & TRAINING The demonisation of psychiatrists in fiction (and why real psychiatrists might want to do something about it) Jacqueline Hopson1 Psychiatric Bulletin (2014), 38,175-179, doi: 10.1192/pb.bp.113.045633 1University of Sheffield Summary To encourage psychiatric practitioners to be aware of and to work to Correspondence to Jacqueline Hopson counteract the representations of the profession as evil manipulators in fiction, film (j.hopson@sheffield.ac.uk) and popular culture. A wide-ranging number of representative sources portraying First received 29 Sep 2013, final psychiatrists are explored. It is demonstrated that psychiatry is overwhelmingly revision 4 Dec 2013, accepted 11 Dec presented in a damagingly negative light. 2013 B 2014 The Royal College of Declaration of interest None. Psychiatrists. This is an open-access article published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Psychiatry has never enjoyed the respect and social prestige believed, often have appallingly evil tendencies. It is these of other medical specialties. In a 2004 survey of medical fictional portrayals of psychiatrists that present the most students, Rajagopal et al found the following reasons were prevalent and readily accessible images of the profession to ‘prominent for not choosing psychiatry’: ‘boring, unscientific, the general public. These are the damagingly negative, depressing, stressful, frustrating and ‘‘did not enjoy rotation’’ widespread representations that dominate the way in which 1 (in that order)’.
    [Show full text]