Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good

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Another experiment showed that diagnoses were not consistent between psychiatrists. It sent the same patients to different psychiatrists and showed that they got different diagnoses from psychiatrists around a third of the time. Additionally, the prevalence of different diagnoses seemed to be regional, with some diagnoses being more prevalent in certain countries. The development of the DSM-III and its subsequent versions has been a major accomplishment in the history of psychiatric nomenclature. Clinicians use the DSM criteria in clinical practice as an effective way to communicate the clinical picture, the course of illness, and efficacy of treatment.” The utter greed of the bankers who caused the financial crash in 2008 is now mirrored by the greed of big corporations who are raising prices exponentially while wages stagnate. It is that same greed for profits in the pharmaceutical corporations that is failing psychiatry today and all who suffer from the system as patients. The utter corruption we are witnessing today in Government and in big business has also undermined the idea that psychiatry can be trusted to be scientific. I've read a bit around this topic over many years and wondered at first whether I really needed to have this book to read, in that the general issues: credibility of the DSM, big pharma, the increasing use of medication for dealing with the expanding label of depression and so on, are fairly well established, not that there's been much change as a response to the evidence and perspectives presented. A "thought-provoking" look at the psychiatric profession, the overprescribing of pharmaceuticals, and the cost to patients' health ( Booklist).

Cracked by M James Davies | Waterstones Cracked by M James Davies | Waterstones

I think this is a really important book. As Peter Hitchens (Mail on Sunday) put it...this "Should be read by every doctor....by everyone in politics and the media, not to mention any concerned citizen".James Davies, with a PhD in social and medical anthropology from Oxford, begins with a history of psychiatry starting in the 1970s and a crisis of confidence it faced. A series of experiments questioned the validity and reliability of psychiatric diagnosis.

James Davies publishes new book “Sedated: How Modern Dr James Davies publishes new book “Sedated: How Modern

Author 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.c) The training of future psychiatrists must install greater awareness of psychiatry's scientific failings and current excesses as well as how to manage patients outside the medical model. Dr Davies said, “by sedating people to the causes and solutions for their socially rooted distress – both literally and ideologically – our mental health sector has stilled the impulse for social reform, which has distracted people from the real origins of their despair, and has favoured results that are primarily economic while presiding over the worst outcomes in our health care system”.

CRACKED | Kirkus Reviews CRACKED | Kirkus Reviews

Dr James Davies, Reader in our Departments of Psychology and Life Sciences, has published a book investigating the vast increase in mental health interventions since the 1980s, despite there being no clear improvement in clinical outcomes over the last four decades. This is an excellent book...(it) careens, almost literally, from one psychiatric outrage to the next...I strongly recommend this book." This citation seems academically sloppy and perhaps shows that Davies seeks to oversimplify a complex and murky issue into a one-sided story (though this also might reflect my innate bias against pop-science books). I can't believe that drug companies can have this type of relationship with health professionals--effectively paying them to use and aggressively promote their products to patients. Of course, the professionals are then going to prescribe these drugs, no one is immune to this kind of monetary temptation. I also didn't really find any plausible evidence for the author's statement that drugs have horrible side effects - his examples were all symptoms of the diseases the drugs are meant to treat, so how does he know they're caused by the drugs, but not by the illness that is basically left untreated if, as he suggests, the drugs aren't actually effective in curing the person?This means there is a reliability problem in the field, which casts serious doubts on the entire DSM-structured paradigm. Indeed, the problems within the field of psychiatry often see the same patients receiving differing and possibly conflicting diagnoses at an alarmingly high rate: b) there needs to be more thorough regulation an transparency regarding psychiatry's financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry Perhaps this altered state of mind can be helpful to alleviate painful emotions and give us a chance to make changes to our lives so the drugs are not needed. Yet, this is not the case if we are told that those drugs are a cure and we must stay on them for life. And not if we are left finding the withdrawals from those drugs unbearable. The RSP president argues that the current methods enable them to get mental health funding. The DSM people that they expect users, somewhat Biblically, to make their own interpretations rather than taking the DSM literally. The latter seems a general issue in anything to do with personality and social policy – people using questionnaires and methods literally; not finding out who the person/s are before making decisions about them. You can add your own here. Being a young medic who will very soon find himself in the chair making referrals to psychiatry and psychotherapy, I considered myself having a deep personal stake in reading what Davies had to say. And I am glad that Davies puts forth his case so convincingly. Being a medical trainee who devoured every moment of soaking every word of psychology at A-Levels where utterly disparate models of human behaviour could co-exist in a curriculum, I went on to get completely disillusioned after reading psychiatry with its all-explained-through biology model taught during medical school.

James Davies Andrew Lownie Literary Agency :: Authors :: James Davies

Davies also writes about the conflicts of interest that have become endemic to the field recently. Namely, a large number of medical professionals, universities, and medical associations collect bountiful fees from large pharmaceutical companies; in the form of pro-drug speaking fees, donations, consultancy work, and other assorted compensations and incentives for prescribing and advocating for these controversial medications.First of all, I do agree that overdiagnosing and overmedicalisation are problems that should be taken into account. However, I really didn't like the extreme approach in this book, as well as the awfully subjective examples (like interviews, "my neighbor once said" or "this person thinks that his son was misdiagnosed" type of shit) and far-fetched conclusions. I don't think there's a point in blaming the DSM and its creators for causing a wave of overdiagnosing - it's the specialists who are not doing their job correctly or considering the context of problems) and the problem lies with the education and moral principles and the system. The whole part where the author blames the DSM is just so unnecessary - the DSM is already out there and I still think it's better than nothing - the probability of misdiagnosing would be a lot greater if not for the DSM. Dr James Davies graduated from the University of Oxford in 2006 with a PhD in social and medical anthropology. He is now a Reader in social anthropology and mental health at the University of Roehampton. In fact, although not mentioned by the author here; regular vigorous exercise can be as (or more) effective in reducing depressive episodes as pharmaceutical intervention, without any of the accompanying side effects. Exercise regulates hormones and neurotransmitters, reduces inflammation, increases BDNF; among many other benefits and harm reductions. One has to question the validity of the DSM when (by a relatively close vote of the US Psychiatric Society) homosexuality was removed from the DSM as a psychiatric illness. And one must also question the validity of ADHD diagnostics when in Canada there was an explosion of diagnosis of kids with ADHD and it was found that it was highly correlated with the month of the year. What had happened was the kids in the one class could be over a year different in actual age and the younger kids had lower attention spans.