Against the Mental Health System
The author presents the stories of seven people who sought psychiatric help. "Each had been told the prognosis was very bad and that lifelong medication would be needed. Farber's presentation alternates between any one patient's account and statements by the mental health staff involved. . . . Farber {aims to} show that external factors were routinely ignored and that patients were not treated in a therapeutic manner, found no hospitality in institutions, and received no help in overcoming their problems . . . . He argues against both the psychoanalytic and the biochemical imbalance models of mental illness, maintaining that the so-called "epidemic of mental illness" is a self-fulfilling prophecy created by institutional mental health.'" (Booklist) Index. Reviews
"A passionate, pointed and powerful castigation
of psychiatric 'treatment,' and a heartily welcomed invitation to re-envision
our conception of 'mental illness'."
"Farber's book should be essential reading
for all psychiatric survivor-activists, human rights and civil rights advocates,
and even those few medical students and social science graduate students
who have not yet been brainwashed by psychiatric dogma."
THOMAS SZASZ, M.D., is considered a brilliant revolutionary thinker by some - a dangerous renegade by others. In either case, the author of The Manufacture of Madness, Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry, and Sex by Prescription is one of the most important writers in present-day psychiatry.
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