Book description
Towards the end of the twentieth century, the solution to mental
illness seemed to be found. It lay in biological solutions, focusing
on mental illness as a problem of the brain, to be managed or improved
through drugs. We entered the 'Prozac Age' and believed we had moved
on definitively from the time of frontal lobotomies to an age of good
and successful mental healthcare. Biological psychiatry had triumphed.
Except maybe it hadn't. Starting with surprising evidence from the
World Health Organisation that suggests people recover better from
mental illness in a developing country than in the first world,
Doctoring the Mind asks the question: how good are our mental
health services, really? Richard Bentall picks apart the
science that underlies current psychiatric practice across the US and
UK. Arguing passionately for a future of mental health treatment that
focuses as much on patients as individuals as on the brain itself,
this is a book set to redefine our understanding of the treatment of
madness in the twenty-first century.
Richard Bentall has held chairs in clinical psychology at the
universities of Liverpool and Manchester, and is currently Professor of
Clinical Psychology at the University of Bangor in Wales. Known
internationally for his research into the causes and treatment of severe
mental illness, his previous book,
Madness Explained: Psychosis and
Human Nature
won the British Psychological Society Book Award for 2004.
