Tom Dufresne reviews 2 new books in Saturdays Globe and Mail .Prescriptions for the Mind, by Joel Paris; Doctoring the Mind, by Richard Bentall .
The books attack big pharma and lazy doctors for not doing enough to help patients. Sometimes talk, not drugs, is all a person needs.
In Prescriptions for the Mind, McGill University psychiatrist Joel Paris contends that psychiatry has moved so far toward drug therapy that talk therapy, tarred by the decline of psychoanalysis, has been marginalized. Once a mainstay of any psychiatrist’s identity, training in talk therapy is now more likely to be viewed as career suicide. Paris laments this folly, arguing that psychotherapy should remain a useful part of every psychiatric practice.
For Bentall, the triumphalist interpretation of biomedical psychiatry’s ascendancy is a con job, driven in part by the “ruthless manipulation” of truth by Big Pharma. Actually, Bentall’s thesis is so old that it’s new again: “Distress in human beings is usually caused by unsatisfactory relationships with other human beings.” Consequently, humane psychiatric treatment should begin by recognizing the complex interaction of biology and environment in the creation of emotional distress.
Link to read the review
Source: Globe & Mail
