Shockingly, people in the west are less likely to recover than those in poorer countries. Kindness and empathy are missing from the system. Drugs dominate but they don’t work well: it’s time to prescribe them only on a suck-it-and-see basis.
Two new books attack big pharma and lazy doctors for not doing enough to help patients. Sometimes talk, not drugs, is all a person needs.
It will certainly be interesting to see what impact, if any, their kind of critique will have on the DSM-V , slated for 2012. In the meantime, here’s a script from a philosopher: Read Paris and Bentall and feel wiser, or certainly more sober, in the morning. I recommend both books to specialists and lay readers alike.
Clinical psychologist Richard Bentall takes issue with the mainstream psychiatric view that mental problems are genetically determined brain diseases that must be treated with drugs. The diagnoses are inaccurate, the genetics and neurobiology overstated, and the drugs oversold and overprescribed. Bentall pulls no punches: “Psychiatry has failed.”