Comment by Bill Penson on February 18, 2013 at 21:04

Ben Goldacre (2008)  'Bad Science'

On the whole this is very good; a breezy trip through scientific method in medicine and some of the areas with that suffer with less rigorous claims. Occasionally Goldacre is guilty of being a bit of a lad, and he typifies humanities graduates poorly (as a social science and a humanities graduate I take exception). He is good at explaining why such practices as homeopathy are problematic. He doesn't object to them per se, but he objects to the way they use scientific language to mystify the potential customer; the same with nutritionalism. The recurring theme is one of mystification, concealing data, suggesting research that hasn't in fact been undertaken and hostility to peer review. It actually reconnected me with empirical research, especially when it is a case of understanding what science does and the extent/limits of its powers. His follow up 'Bad Pharma' is supposed to be good also and I wonder what he would make of the mental health field if he wrote beyond the scandalous SSRIs meta analysis a few years ago that undiscovered suppression of negative data by big pharma suggesting that antidepressants in this groups are only as effective as placebo.Get your sleeves rolled up mental health has lots of bad science.

Comment by Jill Anderson on March 6, 2013 at 12:06

This looks interesting. . .

Rain Forest Asylum: The enduring legacy of colonial psychiatric care in Malaysia
Sara Ashencaen Crabtree.
October 2012, ISBN 9781861771285. 286pp, £22.95 / US$38.00 / €27.50

Mental health services in Malaysia retain many of the approaches of colonial psychiatry. However, the cultural diversity of Malaysia, and the continuing popularity of traditional healing practices introduce values not congruent with colonial premises. The book will interest anyone seeking to understand the post-colonial development of health and social services anywhere. It will also provide important insights for professionals working in any healthcare system with a culturally diverse client base.

 More details at: http://www.whitingbirch.net/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781861771285

Comment by Jill Anderson on June 22, 2013 at 10:28

The therapy industry: the irresistible rise of the talking cure and why it doesn't work by Paul Moloney.  

Publisher's description: 'Across the world anxiety, stress and depression are on the increase, a trend which looks set to continue as austerity measures bite. The official response tells people that unhappiness is just a personal problem, rather than a social one. 

Written by a practising psychologist, with nearly thirty years' experience in the fields of mental health and learning disabilities, The Therapy Industry offers a concise, accessible and critical overview of the world of psychological practice in Britain and the USA. Paul Moloney argues that much therapy is geared towards compliance and acceptance of the status quo, rather than attempting to facilitate social change. 

The Therapy Industry fundamentally challenges our conceptions of happiness and wellbeing. Moloney argues that therapeutic and applied psychology have little basis in science, that their benefits are highly exaggerated and they prosper because they serve the interests of power.'

See here.

Comment by Jill Anderson on November 21, 2013 at 14:06

Has anyone read  'Mad Matters?:

http://www.cspi.org/books/mad_matters

There is a podcast of Peter Beresford talking about the book here: 

http://www.mixcloud.com/raggeduniversity/professor-peter-beresford-...

Comment by Bill Penson on February 27, 2014 at 12:15

What is madness? Guardian review

As titles go, this one sets up quite the expectation. I picked this book up in part because I want to understand Lacan (what a fool, I’m not sure how that will ever happen), and out of a healthy interest in claims to understand madness. Broadly the early parts of the book give a review of psychoanalytic theory as it relates to psychosis and the latter part covers practice and application issues (plus some broad swipes at medical models and certain psychological approaches).

The middle section gets a little bogged down in some old psychoanalytic cases and these appear to be people who have been written about already in the analysis literature. It is a crisis in my empathy that I fail to show much interest in the disenfranchised Russian aristocracy.

Some of Leader’s criticisms of other models seem to ignore how psychoanalysis is arguably another way of doing the same thing. What is different is that he continues to recommend that thought is given to the necessity of long term work and relationships, a shift to towards emotional proximity to the service user rather than professionally protective distance, and the need to understand psychosis as an attempt at psychological restitution not a presentation of illness.  Perhaps of most interest is his notion of quiet madness and his proposition that psychosis is a far more common state than the literature would suggest, and this is because of its very nature- everyday, somewhat banal but still present in everyday paranoia’s, fantastic fantasies and absurd interpretations. In this respect reading Leader led me to reconsider the extent to which my own everyday internal world is anything but distorted and psychotic.

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