Rating:
(7 reviews)
Author: Stuart A. Kirk
ISBN : 1412849764
New from $26.97
Format: PDF
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When it comes to understanding and treating madness, distortions of research are not rare, misinterpretation of data is not isolated, and bogus claims of success are not voiced by isolated researchers seeking aggrandizement. This book’s detailed analyses of coercion and community treatment, diagnosis, and psychopharmacology reveals that these characteristics of bad science are endemic, institutional, and protected in psychiatry. This is mad science.
Mad Science argues that the fundamental claims of modern American psychiatry are not based on convincing research, but on misconceived, flawed, and distorted science. The authors address multiple paradoxes in American mental health, including the remaking of coercion into scientific psychiatric treatment in the community, the adoption of an unscientific diagnostic system that now controls the distribution of services, and how drug treatments have failed to improve the mental health outcome.
This book provides an engaging and readable scientific and social critique of current mental health practices. The authors are scholars, researchers, and clinicians who have written extensively about community care, diagnosis, and psychoactive drugs. Mad Science is a must read for all specialists in the field as well as for the informed public.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Download Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs
- Hardcover: 358 pages
- Publisher: Transaction Publishers (April 4, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1412849764
- ISBN-13: 978-1412849760
- Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 6.3 x 9.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Download Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs
This book should be required reading for all mental health professionals and consumers, as well as every educator, parent, and elected official. Written in lively English with a minimum of psychobabble, it reveals how psychiatry and the pharmaceutical companies collude to snooker the public with fictions about rampant mental "illness," and how their unproven claims are unfortunately reinforced by such trusted agencies as the NIMH and NAMI.
"Mad Science" tracks how the psychiatric manual (DSM) became the definitive guide to abnormal behavior despite its total lack of scientific foundation, and goes on to carefully dismantle each of its pretenses in fair and mind-blowing detail. The book documents how politics, ego, greed, and clever marketing encourage unquestioning belief in every so-called "disorder," and push the dehumanizing notion that all of life's discomforts can (and should) be relieved with a pill. One stunning chapter is devoted to the dismal history of such medication, including the role of "co-opted regulatory agencies" and "plain fraud" in its development.
Please note: "Mad Science" is no raging polemic, although it will surely be dismissed as one by those whose incomes it will threaten, and those who, for whatever reason, choose to embrace pathological labels. The fact is these authors are not radicals but distinguished, award-winning professors. And while their conclusions are not new -- other researchers have been singing this song for decades, and the chorus is growing -- this is the most timely, comprehensive, well-organized argument this psychologist/reviewer has yet seen. It's also a pleasure to read.
Finally, the convincing message of "Mad Science" becomes especially urgent as the DSM-5 arrives in May of 2013.
If you are planning to read only one book about what's wrong with psychiatry, this one is an excellent choice, provided you are proficient in academic English.
The weathered critic of psychiatry will not find any freshly uncovered facts or novel points of view in this book. As the authors themselves state in a footnote, "Writings critical of psychiatric thinking and practice run in the hundreds if not thousands." What makes this one so worthy of appreciation is the way the arguments are organized, without the excessive emotionality or lapses of logic that mar other books on the subject.
Proceeding through the history of psychiatry, the authors explain that how it has always been portrayed to us is not how it really is. Psychiatry doesn't eradicate disease the way vaccinations or antibiotics do. If it did, there would be increasingly fewer people with psychiatric diagnoses, instead of exponentially more. Programs to treat people while living in the community are just as coercive as the state hospitals of the past. The criteria for psychiatric diagnoses are neither reliable nor valid. Psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebos. "Since the very beginnings of hospital psychiatry, an 'effective' treatment was one that could disable the person receiving it." The authors do not oppose taking drugs, they only oppose forcing people to take them or stop taking them.
Like most critics of psychiatry, the authors end their writing by suggesting an alternative. Unlike most critics, the alternative they suggest has not yet been tried and proven ineffective. Their alternative is that psychiatrists should not be allowed to coerce people, write prescriptions, or gate-keep public services. Hurray.
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