Reviews for Anatomy of a psychiatric illness

The average rating for Anatomy of a psychiatric illness based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-27 00:00:00 carol Clemente When an author puts forth the claim that all psychotherapy should be abandoned on the grounds that the entire field is inherently corrupt, one is tempted to dismiss him as a crackpot. But Dr. Masson is no crackpot. He is the former director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and a psychotherapist himself. Given those qualifications Dr. Masson's ideas are worthy of consideration--however radical they may appear. By the time you finish this book, with its well researched history of psychotherapy, you will be convinced. The abuses of patients at the hands of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts over the past century and a half are so horrifying as to make some chapters almost impossible to read. But Masson's object is not to shock us with the details of the sexual, emotional and physical abuse that psychiatric patients have suffered, but to demonstrate that the entire field rests upon a false assumption which basically guarantees that patients will be mistreated. The assumption is that therapists know what sanity is. They do not--for the simple reason that nobody does. The only thing that therapists can know is how their society defines sanity. (Even that is a stretch. Unlike anthropologists, psychologists are not trained to analyze social norms and mores.) As has been amply demonstrated, the notion of sanity changes substantially from one era to the next. A woman in the 19th century could be incarcerated for life in a mental asylum for "incurable pride" or for "moral insanity", terms which we find quaint nowadays, but, as they were taken seriously at the time, destroyed countless lives. And if we find these terms quaint, just imagine how such culturally specific concepts as "neurosis" will be viewed in the future. The reason that Masson takes special aim at psychotherapy, of course, is that it is his area of expertise. In reality any situation in which one human being can decide the fate of another may lend itself to abuse. (As the saying goes: "Power corrupts.") What makes psychotherapy and related fields so unique is the degree to which they have become entrenched throughout the entire system. The diagnosis of mental illness sticks like glue, no matter who makes it, and no matter how little real evidence there is to support it. Masson wrote this book in the 1980s, and it is tempting to think that since then we have come a long way in terms of patient rights, treatment for the mentally ill (however their illnesses may be defined), and general awareness of the pitfalls of psychological diagnoses. Most of us believe that the abuses of the past are now behind us. If you believe that, or that Masson's critique is out of date, think again. In 1988, Ean Proctor, a young boy confined to a wheelchair with ME (known in the US as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) was forcibly removed from his parents on the grounds that they were "enabling" his illness. Ean was taken to a state hospital where to "prove" that his illness was "all in in his head" they threw him into a swimming pool. Ean sank to the bottom and had to be rescued. After several months of such torture, Ean was released to his parents. That was 1988. Have things improved since then? In 2003, Sophia Mirza, who was also diagnosed with ME, was forcibly removed from her home and "sectioned". Her mother, who was a nurse, was accused of perpetuating Sophia's illness (Munchausen by proxy). After several weeks of being abandoned in a darkened room, Sophia was returned to her mother. But she was never to recover from her incarceration. Sophia died in 2005. The autopsy revealed that 80% of the dorsal ganglia of her spine had been damaged due to her illness. How did the "psychological treatment" prescribed for her condition help her? And, most recently, in 2009, a 17-year-old boy from North Carolina, Ryan Baldwin, who had been diagnosed in 2004 and 2005 with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, was removed from his home on the grounds that his parents were enabling his illness (again, Munchausen by proxy). There is to date, absolutely no scientific evidence that Munchausen by proxy even exists. Yet ill children have been taken from their homes, tortured (in the case of Ean), neglected (in the case of Sophia), and traumatized on the basis of what amounts to a religious conviction. (That is, a belief which does not need to be justified, supported by evidence or even understood by a majority of its own adherents.) When a person is defined as mentally ill, whether or not the claim is substantiated, any kind of treatment--or mistreatment--is justified. The mere stigma of mental illness effectively nullifies civil rights. Whether or not you come to the conclusion that Dr. Masson needed to include an alternative to psychotherapy in his book, or that he unfairly judged an entire field by a few bad apples, or that with more research the flaws in psychotherapy can be corrected, there can be no doubt that in 2010, the abuses which Dr. Masson so thoroughly documented are continuing. We are still in the dark ages.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-12 00:00:00 Mark Lindsley A thought-provoking book about the abuse of power in therapeutic relationships. Mason describes extreme human rights violations, perpetrated within the mental health system, and justified as "therapeutic interventions" that are allegedly in the patient's "best interest". While Mason's book alerts one to the scope for perversion within therpeutic relationships, I am not convinced that it makes a case "against therapy". Power is everwhere, and temptations to abuse it are everwhere too. This should not lead us to become inactive as therapists or to give up. Rather, it should make us embrace the work and the responsibility that comes with it.