A few months ago I was surprised to receive a request from an obscure journal of consciousness studies to review a paper. I was surprised because, although it was not immediately obvious from the title, the paper contained the first reports of the primary outcome measure of the massive and notorious STAR-D study, 14 years…
Summary: The treatment of mental disorders with drugs is not the same sort of activity as the use of drugs in medicine. Psychiatric drugs do not target underlying disease or symptom-producing mechanisms; they create an altered state of mental functioning that is superimposed on underlying feelings and behaviours. The ethical implications of the two situations…
A recent study by a Finnish group declares that discontinuing antipsychotics following a first episode of schizophrenia causes higher risk of death or rehospitalisation. The study is based on an observational analysis of routinely collected data, and these analyses can be seriously misleading. It also prioritises short-term outcomes. The study highlights the need for randomised…
Looking at the history of the mental health system reveals the social functions it continues to fulfil and enables us to think about how we might address them more fairly and transparently
The extraordinary media hype over the latest meta-analysis of antidepressants puts the discussion of these drugs back years. Despite the fact that 9% of the UK population are taking antidepressants (1), and rates of prescribing have doubled over the last decade (2), the authors of the analysis are calling for yet more prescribing. John Geddes…
So if mental disorders are not bodily diseases, as I argued in the last blog, what are they and how should we understand them? I realised trying to write this and the next two (and last) blogs how much more difficult it is to set out a positive notion of what mental disorder consists…
I am often asked about alternative ways of helping people with severe mental disorder, especially psychosis. This guest blog by Antoine B.-Duchesne and Sarah Pham describes one such facility in Quebec. It is founded on psychoanalytic principles, but provides a holistic form of care that aims to promote community integration and help people find meaning:
In this blog I look at the argument that mental disorders are brain diseases just like multiple sclerosis or dementia
In this blog I want to come back to the work of Thomas Szasz. The last two blogs argue that bodily states and processes need to be understood in a different way from the way we understand what human beings think and do. Mental ‘illness’ consists of things that people say and do. For Szasz,…
The human body is a material object that is part of the natural world. It is a uniquely personal part of the natural world, but it is a physical substance nonetheless. How it functions internally and how it responds to external phenomena are governed by the principles of living matter, which are the subject…
Joanna Moncrieff 