Doing Psychiatry Wrong. A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession
Abstract
Doing Psychiatry Wrong. A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession Contemporary psychiatry, considered by many as being predominantly “biological” (whatever that term means), seems to be going through a crisis. Intellectually, we have been treading water lately. Morally, we, according to some, have been selling out to the pharmaceutical industry. We also do not provide the best care to our most severely ill patients, at least in some places and some states. We have not fulfilled our spoken and unspoken promises to our patients and to society. We do not have the answers we said we were going to have. Is this something new, or has psychiatry gone through something similar before? Rene Muller, author of this volume with a catchy title, Doing Psychiatry Wrong. A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession, seems to believe that psychiatry is failing us, and everybody else, for the first time. As he writes in the Preface to his book, his purpose is “to show that psychiatry is failing Hippocrates's injunction—first by not helping the majority of its patients, and then by harming many of them” (p IX). This volume is divided into Preface, Acknowledgements, 10 chapters and