Review: Cracked: The Unhappy Truth About Psychiatry

Author: James Davis 

(Your review here)I am always interested what the critics say about my craft, and often I learn stuff that makes me a better clinician.  I doubt the writer would be surprised how many of us who work within the industry share his concerns – to me this ability to self critique and reflect is our strength.  I am no so sure other arms of health care are as reflective.  Thus I found Davis’s approach of providing an exposé of Psychiatry’s dirty secrets disingenuous, one that he exposed in the last chapter of his book.  If he were the lone voice in the wind, would he have found so many eminent professionals willing to talk to him so openly?

His “conversation” with “Toby” was tainted by Toby using a lot of clinical language, unlikely to be use by a consumer of mental health care.  As a Mental Health Clinician, I am in consensus with Joanna Moncrieff and her “drug-centred model” as being more plausible than the dominant “chemical imbalanced – brain disease model” that is currently dominant in psychiatry.  I found his interview and interpretation of the interview with Professor Sue Bailey, again disingenuous.  She made valid points, and deserved a fair hearing.

Generally what Davis writes reflects my own views following 20 years of working with people with a diagnosis of Mental Illness.  I am part of the “critical psychiatry” group, which reject the medical “brain disease” model as a basis of mental illness.  I just did not agree with the “angle” he took in writing his book.  Again, I think it is a strength of Psychiatry that we are openly so critical of ourselves.  We are fairly transparent in washing our dirty laundry and disagreements in public.  We openly acknowledge the problems we have with the corrupting influence of Big Pharma.  We probably need our training programs to train clinicians to become more humanistic, and less diagnostic.  These are all valid points.  

Are we giving society what they want is the question?  Does society want our troubles to be able to be treated “with a pill”?  Is society as a whole ready to wrestle with the deep existential problems that inherently are at the root of mental illness?  Blaming psychiatry for not solving these problems seems just a tad unfair.  I wonder if this book is just another shot in the psychology/psychiatry turf war.