Towards the end of the twentieth century, a new approach to treating mental illness seemed to be found. It lay in focusing on madness as a problem of the brain, to be managed or improved through drugs. We entered the 'Prozac Age' and believed we had moved on definitively from the time of mental asylums and frontal lobotomies to an age of good and successful mental healthcare. Chemical psychiatry had triumphed.
Except maybe it hadn't. Starting with surprising evidence from the World Health Organisation that suggests people recover better from mental illness in a developing country than in the first world, Mind Medicine on Trial asks the question- how good are our mental health services, really? In this taut and finely argued book, Richard Bentall picks apart the science that underlies much current psychiatric practice across the US and UK. Challenging everything from the trials by which drugs are approved to the veracity of studies conducted that support drug treatment, and drawing on research he himself has conducted over the course of twenty years, Doctoring the Mindis surprising and humane, bringing the experience of both patients and mental health professionals into focus.
Arguing passionately for a future of mental health treatment that focuses as much on the patients as individuals as on the brain itself, this is a book set to redefine our understanding of the treatment of madness in the twenty-first century.