Cracked

Powerful and headline-grabbing polemic on the failures of the psychiatry industryBy a practising psychotherapist who has written for the New Scientist alongside more academic journalsThe perfect next-read for fans of Ben Goldacre - far more wide-ranging than his Bad Pharma

'You will be illuminated and often shocked and certainly made to think more about how you view the children in your care. Every teacher should read it'

Autorentext
James Davies obtained his PhD in medical and social anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is also a qualified psychotherapist (having worked in the NHS), and a senior lecturer in social anthropology and psychology at the University of Roehampton, London. He has delivered lectures at many universities, including Harvard, Brown, CUNY, Oxford and London, and has written articles about psychiatry for the New Scientist, Therapy Today and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. He is author of The Importance of Suffering: the value and meaning of emotional discontent (Routledge, 2011). He lives with his wife and daughter in Shepherd's Bush, London.

Klappentext

Controversial and powerful - a shocking indictment of the pseudo-science at the heart of modern psychiatry

Zusammenfassung
Why is psychiatry such big business? Why are so many psychiatric drugs prescribed 47 million antidepressant prescriptions in the UK alone last year and why, without solid scientific justification, has the number of mental disorders risen from 106 in 1952 to 374 today? The everyday sufferings and setbacks of life are now 'medicalised' into illnesses that require treatment usually with highly profitable drugs. Psychological therapist James Davies uses his insider knowledge to illustrate for a general readership how psychiatry has put riches and medical status above patients' well-being. The charge sheet is damning: negative drug trials routinely buried; antidepressants that work no better than placebos; research regularly manipulated to produce positive results; doctors, seduced by huge pharmaceutical rewards, creating more disorders and prescribing more pills; and ethical, scientific and treatment flaws unscrupulously concealed by mass-marketing. Cracked reveals for the first time the true human cost of an industry that, in the name of helping others, has actually been helping itself.