Machine generated contents note: -- Notes on Contributors -- Preface; R.Dallos -- Carving Nature at its Joints? DSM and the Medicalization of Everyday Life; M.Rapley, J.Moncrieff&J.Dillon -- Dualisms and the Myth of Mental Illness; P.Thomas&P.Bracken -- Making the World Go Away, and How Psychology and Psychiatry Benefit; M.Boyle -- Cultural Diversity and Racism: An Historical Perspective; S.Fernando -- The Social Context of Paranoia; D.J.Harper -- From 'Bad Character' to BPD: The Medicalization of 'Personality Disorder'; J.Bourne -- Medicalizing Masculinity; S.Timimi -- (...) Can Traumatic Events Traumatise People? Trauma, Madness and 'Psychosis'; L.Johnstone -- Children Who Witness Violence at Home; A.Vetere -- Discourses of Acceptance and Resistance: Speaking Out About Psychiatry; E.Speed -- The Personal Is the Political; J.Dillon -- 'I'm Just, You Know, Joe Bloggs': The Management of Parental Responsibility for First-Episode Psychosis; C.Coulter&M.Rapley -- The Myth of the Antidepressant: An Historical Analysis; J.Moncrieff -- Antidepressants and the Placebo Response; I.Kirsch -- Why Were Doctors so Slow to Recognise Antidepressant Discontinuation Problems?; D.Double -- Toxic Psychology; C.Newnes -- Psychotherapy: Illusion With No Future?; D.Smail -- The Psychologization of Torture; N.Patel -- What Is To Be Done?; J.Moncrieff, J.Dillon&M.Rapley -- Figure: Papers Using Term 'Antidepressant' On Medline 1957-1965 -- Index. (shrink)

In Patricia Churchland's 2006 essay on free will, she cites the case of a middle-aged man who, without any prior history of misbehavior, suddenly became obsessed with child pornography and started to molest his 8-year-old stepdaughter. He was subsequently discovered to have a brain tumor affecting the frontal lobes, and when it is successfully treated his aberrant behavior stopped.Thomas Szasz is famous for his denunciation of the concept of mental illness, and his critique is partly responsible for instigating an enduring (...) philosophical discourse about the nature of mental disorder. Szasz's key insight was the recognition that we find it important to distinguish between situations that are characterized by... (shrink)

Awais Aftab’s response to my article is informative because it expresses what I suspect is a widespread but confused inclination among psychiatrists to “have their cake and eat it.” On the one hand they do not want to be branded as reductionists, so they deny they are equating mental disorder with brain disease or brain mechanisms. Yet, they want to maintain a role for physical causation in mental disorder, because without it the link between psychiatry and medicine starts to look (...) tenuous.Reductionism is the implication of what Aftab is saying, however. By denying any important distinction between behavior produced by a brain disease and other, non-disease driven behavior (which I refer to here as “ordinary... (shrink)