Reviews for Historical explorations in medicine and psychiatry

The average rating for Historical explorations in medicine and psychiatry based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-08 00:00:00 Jon Alve i'm reading through it, wondering whether to use it for teaching, and feeling squeamish about its annoying whiggishness, its refusal to see how psychiatry is not exactly a science and the way it evolved is not driven solely by good intention and a pure drive towards genuine improvement. ********************* this man has an irritatingly aggressive way of writing. he really, really doesn't like antipsychiatry, and he takes constructionism very literally. he lurvs hard-core biological psychiatry, and although i am not dumb enough to deny that something may be very, very wrong in the brain functioning of some "mentally ill" persons, i also think that the scene is a bit more... complex? yes? that there are many factors at play when we decide the someone is mentally ill (often against the person's own assessment of his or her mental illness) and needs to be treated (often against his or her seriously informed consent)? the we can and do construct hard-core reality all the time, by investing it with all sorts of values and valences and meanings? etc. etc. etc.? why is it anyway that the proponents of psychiatry-as-science squirm away from discussing centuries of intolerable psychiatric cruelty? it's as if i couldn't believe in christianity unless i denied that a lot of people were badly damaged by people who acted in the name of the it. one can still believe that christiany is valid, good, and true in all sorts of ways while recognizing that people acting in the name of some version of it caused a lot of terrible suffering... yes? it is amazing how much is at stake in holding this or that conception of mental illness and this or that conception of what it takes to make the mentally ill better. why do we get so angry about this? what saddens me the most when i read books such as this is that the field of mental health is VERY RARELY seen as a field to which patients can contribute as well. it's as if patients had absolutely no say, ever, in what they need to get better. i find this one of the most shocking realities of mental health.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-12 00:00:00 Hegedues Csaba This book is shameful. The author has clearly no knowledge of psychoanalysis and instrumentalises historical data just to openly offend psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. All this to conclude that medication+psychotherapy is the most effective way of dealing with mental illness. The author's aggressiveness and his fits of rage against certain celebrated and important currents of thought are downright unacceptable in an academic environment and bring him to open contradictions and misuses of quotes. Pity because this is to the best of my knowledge the only recent compendium of the history of psychiatry and it is so rich in data that all those who work in the field have to confront with it. I'll have to cite it of course and I bought it, but I am really angry at having to do this with such an ignorant and annoying author.