De-Medicalizing Misery

'Despite longstanding awareness of the limitations of the medical model when applied to difficulties of human behavior and adjustment, the fields of psychiatry and psychology continue to accede to the pressures of medicine and the drug industry in their conceptualization of these human realities. Ironically, however, this medical model, eager as it is to fit so much of people's experience into diagnostic categories, is a social construction. This book represents a significant effort to de-mystify, de-medicalize, and reclaim important aspects of the human condition.' -Kenneth D. Keith, Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of San Diego, USA

'De-Medicalizing Misery has assembled an impressive cast of leading mental health experts. Together they challenge the simplistic and pessimistic biological model of human distress that has, with eager support from the pharmaceutical industry, dominated the mental health field for far too long. This evidence-based, humane and optimistic book not only explains where biological psychiatry went wrong, it spells out the alternatives.' - John Read, University of Auckland, New Zealand and Editor of 'Models of Madness'

'The psychiatrist or psychologist is expected to do something for every patient sitting in front of him or her, but how robust is the intellectual basis of psychiatric science when psychiatric 'diseases' are merely symptom clusters - clustered by us, not by nature? We are in indeed in the age of the medicalization of everyday life, when Lord Layard, economist and architect of the IAPT programme, can write in the BMJ that 'mental illness' has taken over from unemployment as our greatest social problem. But what is the test of 'mental illness'? In DeMedicalizing Misery the authors examine some of the domains lamentably absent from orthodox psychiatry and psychology training programmes, with their medical model focus, and in so doing raise the IQ of the whole debate. And not just for clinicians.' - Dr Derek Summerfield, Consultant Psychiatrist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London, UK.

'...this is a great book and should be on the shelf of AMHPs (Approved Mental Health Practitioners), practitioners, academics, people with their doubts about the psyprofessions, those too sure of psy-professions, and perhaps essential reading for people who have survived services, have felt their misery with little relief and have wondered what it is about themselves that remains untreatable.' - British Journal of Social Work

'This book could not be more relevant than now...' - The Psychologist