May 23, 2013

The Critical Psychiatry Network is concerned with the way the controversy over the publication of DSM-5 is being portrayed in the media and by some academic psychiatrists. The issues raised by the DSM are complex and require careful and studied consideration. There are two aspects in particular that concern us. These relate to the portrayal of the controversy as a guild dispute, and the polarisation of the debate as one of nurture versus nature.
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Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: critical psychiatry

May 7, 2013

The decision by the National Institute of Mental Health to part company with the APA’s forthcoming DSM-5 should not be taken as evidence that biological psychiatry is entering a terminal decline. Far from it, as the Director of NIMH Thomas Insel’s blog of 29th April 2013 makes clear, the reason NIMH has opted for its own Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDoC) is because they believe psychiatric patients deserve something better.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Research, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: critical psychiatry, neuro-imaging, philosophy

April 17, 2013

Tension mounts across the ideological divide as D-Day (DSM-5 Day) approaches. The APA has powerful allies on its side. President Obama has just launched Decade of the Brain 2 with the announcement two weeks ago that heralds the arrival of BRAIN ( Brain Research through Advances in Innovative Neurotechnologies). If that’s not enough, those who believe that science will ultimately explain madness can always rely on the media to fawn at their feet.
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Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Genetics, Research | Tagged as: neuroscience

March 20, 2013

The International DSM-5 Response Committee, sponsored by Division 32 of the American Psychological Association — the Society for Humanistic Psychology — now has an online petition against the DSM-5.  This is a truly international effort. Please support the petition by signing it at http://dsm5response.com

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Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

February 19, 2013

The DSM claims to be a scientific system of classification. The validity of any system of scientific classification is the extent to which it can be shown to reflect the real world. Fifty years of study and investigation, and huge sums of money spent across the Western world on neuroscientific research institutes, on careers and equipment, has failed to establish the validity of a single psychiatric diagnosis.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Mad in Academia | Tagged as: critical psychiatry

January 28, 2013

Why do stories matter? Why is it that what a psychiatrist says to a patient about their experiences can have such a powerful effect – for good or for ill? This is something that has puzzled me for many years. It still does.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: narrative psychiatry

January 21, 2013

Over the last twenty years there has emerged a body of work that questions the assumptions that lie beneath psychiatric knowledge and practice. This work, appearing as academic papers, magazine articles, books, and chapters in books, hasn’t been written by academics, sociologists or cultural theorists. It has emerged from the pens and practice of a group of British psychiatrists.

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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: critical psychiatry

January 10, 2013

In the summer we spent hours together on the crags overlooking the valley. You loved to watch the birds spin crazily beneath your feet. Sometimes you would lie on your back in the warm sun, losing yourself in the vast …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: critical psychiatry, narrative psychiatry

December 23, 2012

Bill ran his own business; he was a busy man who didn’t like taking time off. Time for Bill was money, and that, perhaps, was a part of the problem. He wanted money, lots of it, and he never took …
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Categorized in: Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: critical psychiatry, narrative psychiatry

December 15, 2012

This shorter-than-usual contribution signifies a departure from my earlier blogs. It is the first in an occasional series that uses semi-fictional clinical narratives to examine some of the difficulties that face people who use psychiatric services in England, and the psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who work in them.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: critical psychiatry, narrative psychiatry

December 6, 2012

Apart from the admission of a thirty-year-old woman to a private hospital in London with a bit of morning sickness, the main thing to make the news here recently was the hullabaloo over the publication of the ‘Schizophrenia Commissions” report, …
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Categorized in: Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: mental health, mental illness, psychiatric diagnosis, psychiatric labels, Schizophrenia

September 25, 2012

Biological psychiatry is afflicted by an ague. Or maybe it’s the pox. The precise diagnosis in unimportant, and it may not even be a terminal decline, but there is serious discontent with the brain that was once thought to be broken. Narrative psychiatry opens the way for much-needed future work: how psychiatrists might use diagnosis, medication (especially the placebo effect), and psychotherapy (especially the non-specific factors common to all forms of psychotherapy). Most important of all narrative psychiatry has the potential to equip us to work more respectfully with people whose cultural beliefs differ from our own.
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Categorized in: Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: narrative, Psychiatry

June 1, 2012

It took me a while to fathom out the conversation I had at the age of seventeen with my headmaster. ‘Well, Thomas, what are your plans?’ He always insisted on interviewing sixth formers before they applied to university, this in …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: ethics of care, mental health, philosophy, social mobility

May 10, 2012

Some years ago I was appointed as a non-executive director to the board of a leading Mental Health Trust. It served a culturally diverse population in a large Northern city with a population of around half a million. I had …
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Categorized in: Community, Foreign Correspondents, Non-Drug Approaches, Trauma/Distress | Tagged as: mental health, mental health recovery, philosophy, social justice, society

April 16, 2012

When David Bennett died, pinned face down beneath the bodies of four nurses in a secure psychiatric unit, he was just thirty eight years old and had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It took him twenty eight minutes to die, an …
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Categorized in: DSM, Foreign Correspondents, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders | Tagged as: Schizophrenia

March 5, 2012

A scientific revolution transformed medical care in the second half of the twentieth century. Developments in molecular biology, genetics and other fields resulted in new insights into many diseases, and from this, more effective treatments. More recently this revolution, which …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: EBM, Neuroleptic Drugs, placebo, Psychosis, Schizophrenia

February 8, 2012

Some years ago the BBC asked me to take part in a phone-in on Radio 4 about hearing voices. The programme was to take place immediately after the broadcast of a play about hearing voices written by Sara Maitland, a …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents, Uncategorized | Tagged as: Media, Schizophrenia, technological psychiatry