Critical Psychiatry [antikvár]

IntroductionThe background of this bookMental illness, we are told, is a major problem of our time. Most citizens of the West, even if they do not see it as their problem, are constantly reminded of its existence: charity appeals drum home the statistics - in Great Britain, one in nine men and one in six women can expect to enter a mental hospital, while 25 per cent of all hospital beds are occupied by mental patients. In the U.S.A., we read, doctors write 200,000,000 prescriptions for psychoactive drugs in the course of a single year.But what exactly is this problem, and why do we seem so bad at solving it? According to most psychiatrists, it is a clinical problem like any other, which medical technology, in its relentless forward march, will eventually get rid of for us - provided the funds keep coming in. If we do not seem to have made much progress to date, that is because psychiatry is stiU an 'infant science'.To many thinking people, though, there seems to be something wrong with this answer. Mental illnesses, by and large, do not feel like other iUnesses - the 'symptoms' are not annoying externalities, like the spots on the face of the chicken-pox victim; on the contrary, they seem to be features of the very life a person leads, and they reach down to the core of the personality. And there is surely something irrational about such exclusive concentration on treatment of the symptoms, when in fact these supposed illnesses seem to be generated as an inevitable by-product of our way of life - so inevitable, that developing countries about to take up the Western way of life are advised to set aside ample provision in advance for its psychiatric casualties.'Indeed, the technological solution has its critics even within psychiatry itself. Disagreements which have existed for over a century continue to smoulder, as the proponents of rival theories and treatments vie for supremacy: significantly, the best recent account of British psychiatry bears the title Psychiatry in Dissent.^ Moreover, in the last two decades new voices have been heard challenging the leadership