Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry, by Tom Burns
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Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry, by Tom Burns
PDF Ebook Online Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry, by Tom Burns
The first attempt in forty years to explain the full subject of psychiatry, from one of the world’s experts.
In what will be a tour de force in the field of psychiatry in all its complexity and depth, this important new volume explores the essential paradox of psychiatry―and offers a balanced understanding of its history and development in the medical world. Much is written about psychiatry, but very little that describes psychiatry itself. Why should there be such a need? For good or ill, psychiatry is a polemical battleground, criticized on the one hand as an instrument of social control, while on the other the latest developments in neuroscience are trumpeted as lasting solutions to mental illness.
Which of these strikingly contrasting positions should we believe? This is the first attempt in a generation to explain the whole subject of psychiatry. In this deeply thoughtful, descriptive, and sympathetic book, Tom Burns reviews the historical development of psychiatry, throughout alert to where psychiatry helps, and where it is imperfect. What is clear is that mental illnesses are intimately tied to what makes us human in the first place, and the drive to relieve the suffering they cause is even more human.
Psychiatry, for all its flaws, currently represents our best attempt to discharge this most human of impulses. It is not something we can just ignore. It is our necessary shadow.
Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry, by Tom Burns - Amazon Sales Rank: #2516305 in Books
- Brand: Burns, Tom
- Published on: 2015-06-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.60" h x 1.10" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry, by Tom Burns Review “[A] fascinating analysis of the scientific and medical exploration of the mind. Burns brings a carefully measured combination of personal and professional experience. Throughout this insightful and learned book, Burns poses questions, and offers some answers, that reveal the problematic nature of his profession and establish him as a thoughtful, erudite guide through a demanding landscape.” (The Washington Post)“Burns (chair of social psychiatry, Oxford Univ.) learned about mental illness growing up with a seriously depressed mother who was helped by psychiatry. Reflecting on his four decades in “medicine’s most disputed discipline” in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere around the world, Burns illuminates its advances, controversies, and mistakes. A savvy clinician and historian, he covers diagnosis and treatment from ancient times to the present. For him psychotherapy is the key intervention, while medication is secondary. Psychiatric illnesses “are part of what we are, not things that just happen to us such as flu or a broken leg.” There are fine chapters on neuroscience and pharmaceuticals (drug companies spend more on marketing than on research!), and Burns covers antipsychiatry movements, the insanity defense, and the impact of war. With the closing of large mental hospitals and our failure to create community mental health centers, U.S. jails and city streets have become lodging places for thousands of patients. VERDICT: A compassionate healer and articulate scholar, Burns has written one of the best books ever on psychiatry: a comprehensive, engaging text for general readers and professionals.” (Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW)“Displaying the dignified passion of someone trying to construct a better world, Burns shows us psychiatry''s triumphs and is frank about its pitfalls.” (Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree)“Provocative, well-researched, and well-suited to interested lay readers looking for insight into medicine and the mind.” (Publisher's Weekly)“A comprehensive history and analysis of the practice of psychiatry...A responsible, evenhanded exploration of a highly provocative medical industry.” (Kirkus)“A readable overview of the history and development of psychiatry.” (Choice)“In his cool and rational book Our Necessary Shadow, Burns makes a powerful case.” (The Financial Times)“Tom Burns is calm, sympathetic, and willing to listen to a wide variety of views. Just the person you would like to be in charge of your care if you were assailed by madness.” (The Times (London))
About the Author Tom Burns is Professor of Social Psychiatry at Oxford University. In addition to his clinical and teaching work, he has produced nearly two hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles. He lives in England.
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7 of 11 people found the following review helpful. Psychiatry is wonderful because I say so By Mira de Vries "I wrote this book to give an understanding of what psychiatry is, what it can do and what it cannot do." With this explanation the author starts his introduction. He goes on to acknowledge that zillions of books have already been written on the subject representing a broad spectrum of views for and against psychiatry. "[W]hich should you believe? Should you believe either? Is it perhaps possible to believe both?...I hope to clarify some of these contradictions so you can decide for yourself. ... I hope I have succeeded in conveying both sides of the debate." Yet the reader knows what Burns wants him to conclude before opening the book: we need psychiatry. The title says so.Why do we need psychiatry? Because, according to Burns, it works. He repeats this sentiment in a variety of wordings scores of times throughout the book. How it works, how often it works, and how its efficacy is determined he mentions nowhere. "I made a decision to keep this book free of references" he states in the acknowledgments even ahead of the introduction. Fair enough. A reference makes a statement look scholarly but doesn't make it true. However if you're going to rest your entire case on this one claim, expecting the reader to accept it on faith won't do. In fact I don't. Psychiatry does not work, ever. Nobody gets better from it, only worse. My source for this is the testimony of my own eyes and ears."Establishing and sustaining a trusting relationship with a troubled and suspicious patient is a skill," he posits, suggesting that psychiatrists have this skill. "It is simply not the case that psychiatrists only focus on symptoms and prescribing pills." This is not fact, it is propaganda. In my country some psychiatrists never even meet the "patient" but rather base their opinions about him/her on discussions with the nursing staff and social workers. When there is actual contact between psychiatrist and "patient" it more likely adversarial than "trusting".This type of propaganda continues in Chapter 1, entitled "What to expect if you are referred to a psychiatrist" in which Burns makes all sorts of claims for psychiatrists' skills and abilities such as "intuition" and "see[ing] through ... emotional understatement" being "slow to pass judgment" and "feel[ing]" when someone is depressed. He sums up with "I think psychiatrists as a group tend to be warmer, more approachable and more understanding than most doctors."Chapter 2, The origins of institutional psychiatry, presents some history and ends with more propaganda: "a mini-revolution with the introduction of new and dramatically effective specific interventions."In Chapter 3, The discovery of the unconscious, he states "Mesmer's methods seem like so much hocus-pocus today but they were a radical break with a superstitious past." Is hocus-pocus not superstitious? "The magnetizers ... established that we have ideas and memories of which we are not conscious." They didn't establish that, they claimed it. Such claims justify the psychiatrist attributing to his "patient" thoughts and memories that he does not have. Thoughts and memories are by definition consciousness. Unconsciousness is precisely the absence of thought and memory such as during a coma or general anesthesia. "[T]he reality of an unconscious mind has been accepted by most professionals working in the field." That doesn't make it exist."The rise and fall of psychoanalysis" occupies Chapter 4, the fall being brought about by "effective antipsychotics and antidepressants." It is true that some people manage to hang on to their ordinary lives for many years while taking antidepressants -- which are synthetic cocaine -- just as other people manage to do so while taking real cocaine (for instance Sigmund Freud and popular Washington DC mayor Marion Barry). But "antipsychotics"? I have yet to meet someone on these drugs whose life is not utterly destroyed.Chapter 5 deals with a variety of (mis)treatments introduced during the interwar period, such as malaria, insulin shock and ECT. Burns believes in the efficacy of ECT and plugs it several times throughout the book. About insulin shock he states, "The apparently wonderful earlier outcomes are now thought to be due to unintentional selection of patients most likely to recover and optimistic attitudes of the staff caring for them." More likely reports on "wonderful outcomes" were based on wishful thinking, as are the wonderful outcomes Burns himself reports in his book. Such untruths are the mainstay of psychiatry.Chapter 6 deals with The impact of war, and contains some valid observations. "Big personalities have always had a disproportionate effect on the course of psychiatric advances." If the word advances is changed to practices that is certainly true.Chapter 7 deals with the transition from coercion in large institutions to coercion "in the community" made possible according to Burns (and other psychiatrists) by the "drug revolution." He neglects to mention that budget cuts, not drugs, emptied the institutions. He calls this shift "our strongest assurance against the abuse and poor practice that have disfigured periods of our history." Were this but true. For the unwanted, battered, and homeless "in the community" means that they are now denied the one service that they ever really needed: shelter. Furthermore shooting people up with depot neuroleptics (misleadingly called antipsychotics) and not sticking around to watch them deteriorate helps blind psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses to the harm they do. Poisoning people and subsequently leaving them on their own and helpless in this condition is no less abuse and poor practice than what went on in the institutions of yore (and still goes on).In the chapter exploring psychiatry's legitimacy Burns discusses some of its best-known critics, Foucault, Goffman, Szasz, and Laing. (There were and still are many others.) Although he heads this section "The rise of anti-psychiatry" he acknowledges that none of these critics considered themselves anti-psychiatrists, nor were they part of a coordinated movement, but rather each was highly individualistic. That's a refreshing improvement compared to other authors who sweep all of these names under the same carpet. Ten points for Burns. He credits them with "leaving a lasting legacy both within the profession and in our wider understanding of the human condition." He is least enamored of Szasz, although I am impressed that contrary to many other opponents of Szasz, Burns has actually read at least some of his books and made an honest attempt to understand his point of view. He states "I find him deliberately simplistic." That is true and Szasz was aware of it. He called it his "shorthand". Burns further finds fault with Szasz for rigidly adhering to the view that there can be no "real illness" in the absence of an identifiable physical cause. Here too Burns has a valid point. When we don't know the cause of a strange behavior, and we usually don't, it is just as wrong to assume the absence of a physical cause as it is to assume the presence of a physical cause. But then Burns pulls a fast one on us. He asks rhetorically "What would Szasz have made of the accumulating evidence of relative over- and under-activity of neurotransmitters in various psychiatric disorders?" We don't have to wonder, we know exactly what Szasz made of it. What do you make of the fact that no such evidence exists? There isn't even a method for determining the activity of neurotransmitters in human beings. Burns has already admitted in Chapter 1 that the only lab tests done in psychiatry are to monitor the effects of the chronic poisoning. The role of neurotransmitters is theory and conjecture, not fact, promoted by the pharmaceutical industries to justify selling their products. Burns then continues to criticize Scientologists for their controversial therapies as though Szasz were somehow responsible for them. Although Szasz agreed to lend his name to Scientology's offshoot Citizens' Commission on Human Rights, he was not a Scientologist and didn't believe in Scientology.Next comes a chapter in which Burns attempts to expose some of what he considers the sins of psychiatry. He is to be commended for mentioning the T-4 program, albeit briefly. Most psychiatrists know nothing about it. Under the header "Psychotherapy oversteps the line" he states about certain non-mainstream therapies "Having submitted yourself to something that is gruelling and unpleasant there is a strong incentive to believe it works." Why would this be true for alternative psychotherapies and not for ECT?In a chapter dealing with psychiatry and the law he makes some fair points. "[C]ourts want all the help they can get." The contribution of psychiatrists in perverting the course of justice is mentioned in a different chapter in the discussion of recovered memory syndrome, but could have been mentioned here too. Even if somebody really is crazy, that does not prove he committed the crime in question. "Psychiatry seems to be safer when it restricts itself to 'abnormalities' or differences that are obvious even to the layperson." In other words, lay people can judge that someone is crazy just as well. A very valid point regarding law he makes in a later chapter. "The wording in [compulsory treatment] legislation is convoluted and, frankly, rarely bears careful scrutiny." In other words, the content of coercion laws is irrelevant, as neither psychiatrists nor judges respect the safeguards for human rights. They don't have to. They aren't accountable to anybody.We're nearing the end. The next chapter is "A diagnosis for everything." Most psychiatrists agree that the DSM, a thick catalog of diagnoses, goes over the top. But few campaign for abandoning it, and neither does Burns. He would be happy to shrink it. Like so many others authors in the field, he has his pet (non)diseases. "I have never come across a diagnosis of caffeine-induced insomnia." Burns would also like to see addictions and personality disorders tossed out, not because they don't exist but because the people who answer to these criteria are annoying and psychiatrists don't know how to deal with them. He's rather naive to imagine that abolishing categories from the DSM will change anything. Psychiatrists will simply resume labeling annoying people schizophrenic like they did before the DSM introduced special categories to accommodate them. And psychiatrists will continue drugging them into oblivion like they do everyone else. He continues "One in ten of ten-year-old boys in the USA ... is currently prescribed stimulants for ADHD. Now, wherever the threshold should lie ... this level surely cannot make sense." What should USA child-psychiatrists do, apply some sort of scale, and prescribe stimulants only to the top (or bottom) percentage that makes sense to Burns? If "One in ten cannot make clinical sense" then what doesn't make sense is the clinic (diagnosis and treatment).The last chapter (except for a brief epilogue) is the apparently obligatory prediction of the future, which he calls "The rise of neuroscience." I will not fault the author for it as such chapters always contain nonsense -- nobody can predict the future. Thankfully he does have some very welcome news for us. "The main threat to psychiatry's survival may ... be ... a dramatic fall in the number of doctors choosing to go into it. ... Most doctors coming into psychiatry in [the USA and UK] are foreign graduates ... who are often disappointed by not being able to get surgical or medical jobs." I haven't noticed this influx of foreign graduates in the Netherlands but that could be because they don't speak Dutch. Nonetheless we too have a supposed shortage of psychiatrists. Perhaps fewer physicians are willing to spend their careers making and keeping people sick and disabled by poisoning them. If this shortage does herald the end of psychiatry, it is a terrible pity that it is taking so long.Copyright © MeTZelf
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful. sympathetic and economic view of the history; now let's look forward By Hector Good and balanced, and covers the history in a sympathetic and economic way.Interestingly in the fraught and key debate on causality, he seems to lean towards the results of long-term cohort studies (e.g. Dunedin) that show that early childhood experiences are key.One issue he highlights well is that of getting good quality US and UK trainee doctors to choose psychiatry as their specialism; partly because psychiatrists position of professional power is so much weaker than that of physical health doctors (who are still dominant in their worlds).His couple of pages on psychoanalysis (research shows is ineffective, now not offered in US or UK health system, but both analysts and patient enjoy it) reflect fairly typical view within the NHS and effectiveness-based worlds.I very much hope in future he can focus on the now emerging movement towards prevention; he just finger-tip touches in this book. Our outcomes in mental illness treatment are still very poor; as mental illness causes a large and increasing share of human disability (c.23% now) and suffering (we should include collateral suffering of family and friends also), prevention programmes (such as parenting/attachment skills training and use of pre-emptive CBT) are desperately needed; but these need to come from public health, not psychiatry.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Five Stars By Dr. John A. DICKINS a refreshing and comprehensive look at the philosophy of medicine and psychiatry
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