Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good

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Within the book, Dr Davies argues the widespread medicalisation of mental distress has fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Many who are diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric medication are not suffering from biologically identifiable problems. Instead, they are experiencing the understandable and, of course, painful human consequences of life’s difficulties – family breakdowns, problems at work, unhappiness in relationships, low self-esteem. The book concludes that change is possible, so long as we identify and reform the real social drivers of our mental health crisis. Polish rights in Hitler’s Last Plot : The 139 Men, Women, and Children Saved from Imminent Execution in the Final Days of the Third Reich by Jeremy Dronfield & Ian Sayer I will say.. One concept that stood out to me was the difference between the disease-centered model and the drug-centered model. James Davies quotes Dr. Joanna Moncrieff as she explains the difference, “In the disease-centred model, people are assumed to have a mental disease, a problem in their brain. And drugs are thought to be effective because they rectify or reverse that underlying brain problem in some way… But the drug-centred model… rather emphasises that drugs are drugs; they are chemical substances that are foreign to the human body but which affect the way people think and feel. They have psychoactive properties, just like recreational drugs do, which alter the way the body functions at a physiological level.” (103)

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James Davies obtained his PhD in medical and social anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is also a qualified psychotherapist (having worked in the NHS), and a senior lecturer in social anthropology and psychology at the University of Roehampton, London. He has delivered lectures at many universities, including Harvard, Brown, CUNY, Oxford and London, and has written articles about psychiatry for the New Scientist, Therapy Today and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Author James Davies obtained his PhD in medical and social anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is also a qualified psychotherapist (having worked in the NHS), and a senior lecturer in social anthropology and psychology at the University of Roehampton, London. He has delivered lectures at many universities, including Harvard, Brown, CUNY, Oxford and London, and has written articles about psychiatry for the New Scientist, Therapy Today and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. The DSM has gone through a number of editions and each time numbers of "new" mental illnesses have been added to the book Many neuroscientists no longer consider a chemical imbalance theory of depression and anxiety to be valid.’ (Dr David D. Burns, Professor of Psychiatry, Stanford University)Medical naming encourages thinking about human beings in all their complexity as broken, and needing mending – and opens the door to the over-prescription. In fact, as one astute expert (among the many) Davies consults, points out tersely, this thinking of these drugs as ‘cures’ is erroneous, as unlike most physiological disease there just is no hard evidence to support the biology of a lot of what is now being treated as ‘disease’ through these medications – which alter mood. They do not ‘cure’ shyness, (or, lets medicalise it as social phobia) any more than a glass of wine ‘cures’ shyness – both change ways of perceiving the world, that is all. Being a young medic who will very soon find himself in the chair making referrals to psychiatry and psychotherapy, I considered myself having a deep personal stake in reading what Davies had to say. And I am glad that Davies puts forth his case so convincingly. Being a medical trainee who devoured every moment of soaking every word of psychology at A-Levels where utterly disparate models of human behaviour could co-exist in a curriculum, I went on to get completely disillusioned after reading psychiatry with its all-explained-through biology model taught during medical school. Another experiment showed that diagnoses were not consistent between psychiatrists. It sent the same patients to different psychiatrists and showed that they got different diagnoses from psychiatrists around a third of the time. Additionally, the prevalence of different diagnoses seemed to be regional, with some diagnoses being more prevalent in certain countries. Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.

Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good

Dr James Davies graduated from the University of Oxford in 2006 with a PhD in social and medical anthropology. He is now a Reader in social anthropology and mental health at the University of Roehampton. I think this is a really important book. As Peter Hitchens (Mail on Sunday) put it...this "Should be read by every doctor....by everyone in politics and the media, not to mention any concerned citizen". I found it at times got too "sensational" and less rational (as a book like this should be), relying on rhetoric and emotions.

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I found this explanation helpful as I’ve process through the idea that the that chemical imbalance theory has yet to be proved. (“After nearly 50 years of investigation into the chemical imbalance theory, there is not one piece of convincing evidence that the theory is actually correct” (129).) If this theory were true, then chemical imbalances could be cured by intaking the right amount of chemicals (via medication). Davies’ view instead is that pills “don’t cure us - they simply change us” (99). He offers, they are “just providing a temporary and superficial distraction” (100).

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James Davies, with a PhD in social and medical anthropology from Oxford, begins with a history of psychiatry starting in the 1970s and a crisis of confidence it faced. A series of experiments questioned the validity and reliability of psychiatric diagnosis. In Chapter 9, he discusses the utterly immoral process whereby pharmaceutical companies pay psychiatrists and universities to sell their product, and how it is near impossible for any patient to find out if their psychiatrist is being paid to promote the drug they are being prescribed. He discusses what he terms as ‘psychiatric imperialism’ in Chapter 12. In this chapter, he discusses how the West has exported their pathologizing of distress to countries more likely to see it as a result of social or psychological problems. A way forward from this crisis in psychiatry I will accept his grim indictment of the current state of the pharmaceutical industry (indeed, many reviewers are mentioning Ben Goldacre who has pointed this all out before)

This is a very well-written book-intellectually sound, but written in an accessible way...It should be read by all mental health professionals, by all politicians and policy makers charged with shaping future mental health provision" Davies goes on to describe in Chapter 6 how psychiatric drugs can change a person’s personality in a way that the person themselves may not recognise. He explains how antidepressants are not returning us to health but they ‘rather manufacture a new state of mind, and often an unnatural state’ (p.99). In my own experience, I have witnessed friends who are heavily medicated with psychiatric drugs who can seem like an empty shell of the person I had known. Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan (excellent takedown of fads in psychiatry/ how therapy can make things worse) Davies seems to side with the view that some form of suffering is natural for humans and the best way to treat it is through social measures or simply managing it. He suggests a path forward for the profession which has four steps: The DSM has gone through a number of editions and each time numbers of "new" mental illnesses have been added to the book (82 new illnesses from DSM3 to DSM4). So what are all these "new" mental illnesses.