Psychiatry Reconsidered

Psychiatry Reconsidered
Author: H. Middleton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2015-06-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1137384905

Psychiatry suffers a lot of criticism, not least from within its own scientifically founded medical world. This book provides an account of mental health difficulties and how they are generally addressed in conventional medical circles, alongside critical reviews of the assumptions underpinning them to encourage more humanitarian perspectives.

Psychiatry Reconsidered

Psychiatry Reconsidered
Author: H. Middleton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2015-06-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1137384905

Psychiatry suffers a lot of criticism, not least from within its own scientifically founded medical world. This book provides an account of mental health difficulties and how they are generally addressed in conventional medical circles, alongside critical reviews of the assumptions underpinning them to encourage more humanitarian perspectives.

Fears and Phobias

Fears and Phobias
Author: Isaac M. Marks
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2013-09-03
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1483260763

Fears and Phobias reviews and synthesizes the different viewpoints of learning theory, psychoanalysis, ethology, and clinical psychiatry with regards to fears and phobias. The causes and treatment of phobias are examined, with due regard for relevant biological and psychological issues. Topics covered range from the etiology of fear to clinical syndromes such as agoraphobic syndrome, animal phobias, social phobias, illness phobias, and obsessive phobias. Comprised of four chapters, this book begins with an overview of the historical aspects of phobias and the components of phobias, followed by a discussion on the etiology of fear. Experimental studies on fear that focus on innateness, maturation, and learning are examined, together with genetic aspects of timidity; the kinds of situations that are feared; and the physiology and learning of fear. The next chapter deals with clinical syndromes and the classification of phobic disorders such as the agoraphobic syndrome, specific animal phobias, and social phobias, along with illness phobias, obsessive phobias, autonomic equivalents to phobic disorders, and children's fears and phobias. The final chapter is devoted to prevention and treatment of phobias, including desensitization, and psychiatric management of phobic patients. This monograph will be of interest to psychiatrists and psychologists.

Psychopharmacology Reconsidered

Psychopharmacology Reconsidered
Author: Robert Haim Belmaker
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2023-10-18
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3031403711

This thought-provoking book covers the full range of psychopharmacologic practice in textbook fashion, offering a fresh and comprehensive self-examination. Unlike conventional texts of psychopharmacology, this text speaks directly to clinicians who have started to question the limitations of psychopharmacologic claims and the rigid confines of DSM-5 diagnoses. Drawing from their clinical and research experience as well as new literature, the well-published authors provide a new perspective that encourages readers to reevaluate established practices and embrace that medication is just one component of treatment and has limits. The book could be used by psychiatric residents in their course of study, by clinical psychology students taking a psychopharmacology course, or by psychiatrists curious to get a readable but comprehensive look at new critical viewpoints in psychopharmacology that have changed since they were taught. Many neuroscience students who are looking for a review of clinical effects to guide their basic research may also find the proposed text more useful than those texts that collate clinical trials. Current texts are for specialized scientists or are part of multi-authored texts which list drugs alphabetically with no conceptual framework, or books that pretend that each biochemical drug property has a clear and known clinical result presented in cartoon style. Some lesser known texts for psychology or nursing students are not authoritative. Others aimed at patients or families are too simplistic for clinicians. The authors’ goal was to create a unified text expressing their view of psychopharmacology, its evidence base, the unity of its essential principles, and its independence of DSM or ICD diagnosis. Several new history books describe the "rise and fall" of psychopharmacology, the corruption of big pharma and the failure of large controlled clinical trials. Psychopharmacology Reconsidered: A Concise Guide Exploring the Limits of Diagnosis and Treatment ensures that young clinicians are aware of and understand this critical zeitgeist but aware also of the essential core of psychopharmacology and the evidence upon which it rests.

Mistaken Identity

Mistaken Identity
Author: Leslie Brothers
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2001-11-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0791489523

Neuroscientist Leslie Brothers argues that our understanding of the brain is determined by popular beliefs about the mind. She critiques "neuroism," which explains the mind in terms of individual brains, and shows that widely held assumptions about the promise of contemporary brain research are largely false. This book opens up new territory as it uncovers the real connections among human biology, human sociality, and the mind.

Empathy Reconsidered

Empathy Reconsidered
Author: Arthur C. Bohart
Publisher: Washington, DC : American Psychological Association
Total Pages: 477
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9781557984104

[This book is intended] for clinicians, theoreticians, and researchers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

Toxic Interactions and the Social Geography of Psychosis

Toxic Interactions and the Social Geography of Psychosis
Author: Hugh Middleton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2023-10-10
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429602499

Toxic Interactions is a review of quantitative research revealing how urban living, trauma, ethnicity, stress and familial influence the risk of troubling psychotic experiences. Each of these is reviewed in search of their social implications, and a constructivist approach identifies their common threads. The contributions of newer psychotherapeutic approaches such as Open Dialogue and Recovery programmes are considered, and a consistent interpretation emerges; that is not the observable features of disturbed mental state that deserve key attention, but how these are generally understood by others, and in particular the 'client's' close associates. Toxic Interactions and the Social Geography of Psychosis will be welcomed by all who find conventional approaches to mental health difficulties unsatisfactory, whether that is as a practitioner frustrated by the counter-productive expectations of their institutional setting, an academic exploring different perspectives a 'service user' disappointed by not experiencing the care they feel is needed, or as third party perplexed by the contradictions of contemporary psychiatry.

Mental Health Uncertainty and Inevitability

Mental Health Uncertainty and Inevitability
Author: Hugh Middleton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-02-07
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3319439707

This book offers original knowledge, debate, and understanding from frontline fieldwork data and the relations between mental health difficulties, mental healthcare provision, and social theory. Dominant discourse of the last half century has followed a medical perspective. This has marginalised contributions from social science. Furthermore purely medical approaches to mental healthcare have profound shortcomings. Thus, this book draws upon innovative research findings to rejuvenate the relationship between psychiatry and social science. It frames this by reference to certain inevitable and uncertain elements of mental health which characterise this field. Over nine chapters the volume is a unique contribution to several intersecting areas of intellectual enterprise, research, and learning — as well as a source of insight into how mental health practice and policy might be modified and improved. As a result, it appeals to a wide range of audiences including social scientists, mental health practitioners, mental health researchers, social theorists, mental health service users, and policy-makers.

Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen

Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen
Author: Andrew Scull
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 1981-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812211197

The Victorian Age saw the transformation of the madhouse into the asylum into the mental hospital; of the mad-doctor into the alienist into the psychiatrist; and of the madman (and madwoman) into the mental patient. In Andrew Scull's edited collection Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, contributors' essays offer a historical analysis of the issues that continue to plague the psychiatric profession today. Topics covered include the debate over the effectiveness of institutional or community treatment, the boundary between insanity and criminal responsibility, the implementation of commitment laws, and the differences in defining and treating mental illness based on the gender of the patient.

Challenging Psychiatry’s Reliance on the Disease Model

Challenging Psychiatry’s Reliance on the Disease Model
Author: Digby Tantam
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2024-08-22
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1040110436

This volume critiques and challenges the use and promotion of the disease model in psychiatry, arguing that its misconceived approach prevents the preferred disablement model from becoming the default method to understand mental health conditions, including schizophrenia. Featuring first-hand experiences as well as qualitative and quantitative findings, the book posits that mental illnesses are an expression of disablement, not disease, and that the alternative disablement approach (already being applied in the psychiatry of neurodevelopmental disorders but applicable to mental illness, too) allows for greater dignity and autonomy for the patient, collaboration between medical professionals, a replacement of categorical approaches with more appropriate dimensional ones, and a liberation from the restrictive idea of a ‘cure’. The initial chapters of the book summarize the now overwhelming evidence that the disease model is flawed, as is the simplistic materialism that psychiatry has built around the concept of the brain as a kind of standalone biological computer. The later chapters consider the currently existent alternatives to the disease model and put forward the evidence for a psychiatry based on the person, as described by the philosopher Heidegger among others. This volume will appeal to researchers, scholars, and postgraduate students in clinical psychiatry, mental health research, and psychotherapy. Psychologists and clinicians active in research or teaching in mental health will also benefit from this volume.