Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good

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What happens when the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system are activated at the same time? He brings up an interesting story about the removal of homosexuality as a “sexual deviation,” which he says was largely due to pressure from the Gay Rights movement and came down to a vote at an American Psychiatric Association meeting in the 70s, with 5,854 psychiatrists voting to remove homosexuality as a disease and 3,810 voting to keep it in. He is author of The Importance of Suffering: the value and meaning of emotional discontent (Routledge, 2011). The marketing methods deployed by the industry moved psychiatric drugs to the forefront of modern mental health care. 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.

Cracked by M James Davies | Waterstones Cracked by M James Davies | Waterstones

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? Similarly, the public’s want for a simple cure for both psychiatric distress and everyday problems has led to psychiatric drugs being seen more than an effective treatment, but also a simple and convenient solution. Questioning what counts as evidence within the Movement for Global Mental Health, this article maps the physical, psychological and sociopolitical effects of increasingly global psychotropic interventions into children's lives. So, overall, the book left me triggered and enraged in a lot of places, because it just wasn't based on real evidence and/or was making very far-fetched conclusions or statements based on subjective experiences and beliefs.

The paper closes with an ironic resolve by offering a new discursive architecture for the profession of psychiatry. However, the sense of being put into an asylum (even without the insurmountable walls of asylum imagery) haunts us in our experience of Mehendipur.

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

On a personal note one of my cousins was rendered nearly comatose by massive doses of psych drugs prescribed to "treat" a minor depressive episode that did not warrant such massive doses.I would strongly urge all mental health professionals, those in the caring professions as well anybody interested in mental health to read this book.