De-Medicalizing Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition 2011th Edition

The authors of this very recently published book on the medicalization of everyday life include the British child psychiatrist in the tradition of R.D. Laing, Sami Timimi. He writes, in Chapter 7 of the present volume, of the serious situation in which boys find themselves as they have been defined by mainstream psychiatry as defective children. Boys' enthusiasm has been demonized and their liveliness compromised by the forced administration of toxins (certain forms of amphetamines, for example, known in the States under the brand name Ritalin), often as a requirement for the boy to be able to return to school. Parents are usually not aware of what their children are being prescribed and feel guilty that their sons have been banished from school. School officials merely comply with the authority of the medical profession. Timimi's early work was reviewed in THYMOS: JOURNAL OF BOYHOOD STUDIES. What he has written is especially important on two counts: his clear understanding of the precarious situation of boys at the hands of mainstream psychiatry and psychopharmacology, and his debt to the work of R.D. Laing.

As a person who has experienced, and observed in several others people, severe emotional/mental distress this book offers encouragement and inspiration to sufferers, carers and professionals alike as to how there is a need to de-emedicalise the very real causes which lead to acute levels of distress, it points us towards the political struggle required to work towards avoiding stigmatising diagnosis, prognosis and potentially harmful treatments.

Psychiatric drugs do have a place in mental health care but they are not magic bullets and may even cause more damage than than good. De-medicalizing Misery shows us another way to be with and treat mental illness rather than going down a medical route, a route that is rather over-eagerly championed by the pharmaceutical industry.

medicalising problems of living individualising them is very convenient for governments psychiatrists clinic psychologists internalise medicalise problems within indivual not unfair societies societies neo liberal agends makes for distress . these ""treatments" stop people coming together politically e.g forming new parties to change selfish greedy capitalism. drugs make millions for companies

Did not meet my expectations. Looking at the title i expected something totally different from what i got. Guess it is okay for extra reading not as a main text.

As expected