Psychiatric illness and the politics of blame (review of Madness on the couch: blaming the victim in the heyday of psychoanalysis and Blaming the brain: the real truth about drugs and mental health)
CMAJ. 1999 January 26; 160(2): 233–234.
PMCID: PMC1229996
Copyright © 1999 Canadian Medical Association
Psychiatric illness and the politics of blame (review of Madness on the couch: blaming the victim in the heyday of psychoanalysis and Blaming the brain: the real truth about drugs and mental health)
M. G. Leith
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pic...6&blobtype=pdf
Fair use
Excerpt:
A growing number of psychiatric residency programs, he laments, are providing inadequate
psychotherapy training, and HMOs are reducing the role of the psychiatrist
to that of drug dispenser.
The net result is that patients become merely pieces of flawed chemistry to
be put in order by the appropriate agent or combination of agents. No
attempt is made to understand the problem or to offer treatment in a
broader context.
These are cautionary tales. They tell us that today’s gospel could well
be tomorrow’s lie, that the pendulum of opinion in the mind–brain debate,
left unchecked, swings in extremes.
end