Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Psychiatry-skepticism-social justice reading suggestions

Here’s the short list of recommendations I promised in my previous post. These are generally written for a popular audience. As I’ve said in the past, they’re not uniformly perfect in every way – in fact, they don’t all agree with one another on every issue. But taken together they provide a solid overview of the contemporary criticism of psychiatry from various angles, as well as numerous references for further reading in specific areas. Also relevant is my series on Erich Fromm and this list, which I’ve barely begun to dig through.

Mad in America

The Emperor’s New Drugs

Anatomy of an Epidemic

These last two are discussed in Marcia Angell’s pieces in the New York Review of Books, and further here.

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

Shyness

Bad Science

(Goldacre has a new book coming out in the fall, in the UK at least, called…well, I thought it was The Drug Pushers, but it might now be Medicine is Broken. Neither of these focuses exclusively on psychiatric drugs.)

I realize that all of the books I’ve mentioned are by men. Next on my own list is Joanna Moncrieff’s The Myth of the Chemical Cure (no Kindle version, so harder to get)

and some works on the history, anthropology, and sociology of specific “conditions.”

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