June 1, 2014
Burns (chair of social psychiatry, Oxford Univ.) learned about mental illness growing up with a seriously depressed mother who was helped by psychiatry. Initially opposed to pills and electroshock treatment, he came to appreciate their use in her case. Reflecting on his four decades in "medicine's most disputed discipline" in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere around the world, Burns illuminates its advances, controversies, and mistakes. A savvy clinician and historian, he covers diagnosis and treatment from ancient times to the present. For him psychotherapy is the key intervention, while medication is secondary. Psychiatric illnesses "are part of what we are, not things that just happen to us such as flu or a broken leg." There are fine chapters on neuroscience and pharmaceuticals (drug companies spend more on marketing than on research!), and Burns covers antipsychiatry movements, the insanity defense, and the impact of war. With the closing of large mental hospitals and our failure to create community mental health centers, U.S. jails and city streets have become lodging places for thousands of patients. VERDICT A compassionate healer and articulate scholar, Burns has written one of the best books ever on psychiatry: a comprehensive, engaging text for general readers and professionals.--E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 31, 2014
Burns, professor of social psychiatry at Oxford and a practicing psychiatrist, looks at psychiatry and mental illness as a subjective phenomena, yet nonetheless “real” to its subjects and participants. By examining the shadow that psychiatry and psychotherapy cast on other aspects of culture, he reveals the practices to be historically contingent—part of, though frequently at odds with, other branches of medicine—as well as how they have come to define our concepts of personhood, daily life, our legal system, and our view of fate. The book begins as a history of the treatment of mental illness, from humors and asylums to the “discovery of the unconscious,” psychoanalysis and shell shock, and the early, grisly medical cures (insulin wards and malarial treatment of syphilis) of psychiatry. Burns puts forth no defense of psychiatry’s past sins, but is confident in the value of the newly open, evidence-based treatment of mental illness that typifies 21st-century care. While his early chapter on seeking psychological care seems misplaced, Burns’s focus on psychology’s operations in our larger culture is provocative, well-researched, and well-suited to interested lay readers looking for insight into medicine and the mind. Agent: Felicity Bryan (U.K.)