Tales from the Madhouse: An insider critique of psychiatric services (Meet the Author Session)

The book constitutes a persuasive critique of current psychiatric practice within Britain’s National Health Service. Drawing on the author’s 33-year experience of working as a mental health professional –psychiatric... [ view full abstract ]

The book constitutes a persuasive critique of current psychiatric practice within Britain’s National Health Service. Drawing on the author’s 33-year experience of working as a mental health professional –psychiatric nurse, clinical psychologist and manager - the detrimental impact on service users of psychiatry’s stubborn, fallacious and self-serving claims that mental health problems reflect a biological illness are starkly illustrated.

Two distinctive aspects of the book set it apart from other anti-psychiatry books. Firstly, the original structure with each chapter divided into an initial concise, but scholarly, review of a topic, followed by detailed anecdotal observations that vividly illustrate how the topic in question plays out within psychiatric services. Thus, the book will be of interest to mental health professionals, service-users and intelligent general readers. Secondly, the author’s extensive experience within the psychiatric system renders his account an insider perspective that is difficult to dismiss.  

Following a historical overview of how psychiatric services have purportedly advanced since the days of the large asylum, while the mendacious fundamentals of biological psychiatry have endured, subsequent chapters consider each of the negative consequences of assuming mental health problems have primarily a biochemical cause and represent 'an illness like any other'.

Topics covered that are particularly pertinent to psychosis include:

1.     stigma, and how it impinges on the lives of those identified as ‘mentally ill’;

2.      overuse of psychotropic medications, and the underestimation of the harm associated with them;

3.     misuse of power within the framework of the fundamentally discriminatory Mental Health Act;

4.     risk aversion and the associated defensive practices;

5.     pessimism & low expectation, particularly pertinent given the high level of suicide in this clinical population.

An extended final chapter proposes a multi-level series of changes that would improve the ways that services, and society in general, respond to human suffering.