Daniel Freeman
The Guardian
July 25, 2009

While attending his grandmother’s funeral, Andrew – a former soldier in his mid-30s who had been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia – became very upset. Fearing a relapse, Andrew’s brother called a GP, who in turn alerted the psychiatric services. As a result, Andrew was admitted – against his wishes and with the assistance of six police officers – to a local psychiatric ward. It was here that his clinical psychologist, Richard Bentall, arrived to find Andrew sitting quietly, reading a novel, and apparently completely rational. The ward psychiatrist explained to Bentall that Andrew was to be kept in over the Christmas period for observation. Puzzled about the absence of any psychotic behaviour, Bentall asked the ward staff how Andrew had settled in. “He’s excessively polite,” a nurse commented, pointedly. “Can you be excessively polite?” Bentall wondered. “Well,” replied the nurse, “we’re trying to work out whether his politeness is part of his normal personality or his illness.”

This darkly comic anecdote, related in Bentall’s timely and compelling book, is unlikely to assuage general worries about the desirability of psychiatric treatment. How forcefully would you urge a depressed family member to see a psychiatrist? Almost certainly with less vigour than you’d encourage a trip to a specialist were that same relative to be suffering from a worrying physical problem. And in Bentall’s view, you’d be right to be cautious. In particular, he takes issue with the mainstream psychiatric view that mental problems are genetically determined brain diseases that must be treated with drugs. The diagnoses are inaccurate, the genetics and neurobiology overstated, and the drugs oversold and overprescribed. Bentall pulls no punches: “Psychiatry has failed.”

Read entire article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/25/doctoring-mind-richard-bentall-review