Our Necessary Shadow
The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Our Necessary Shadow is the first attempt in a generation to explain the whole subject of psychiatry, from the UK's leading expert, Tom Burns
A lot is written about psychiatry and the things it deals with, but very little that describes psychiatry itself. Why should there be such a need? There isn't a raft of books explaining all the other branches of medicine. But for good or ill, psychiatry is a polemical battleground, critcised on the one hand as an instrument of social control or a barbaric practice, while on the other the latest developments in neuroscience are trumpeted as offering lasting solutions to mental illness.
Which of these strikingly contrasting positions should we believe? This is the first attempt in a generation to explain the whole subject of psychiatry. In this deeply thoughtful, descriptive and sympathetic book, Tom Burns reviews the historical development of psychiatry, the places where there is much agreement on treatment and where there is not, throughout alert to where psychiatry helps, and where it is imperfect. What is clear is that mental illnesses are intimately tied to what makes us human in the first place. And the drive to relieve the suffering they cause is even more human. Psychiatry, for all its flaws, currently represents our best attempts to discharge this most human of impulses. It is not something we can just ignore. It is our necessary shadow.
Tom Burns is Professor of Social Psychiatry at Oxford University. From the late 1980s he has conducted research, in addition his clinical and teaching work, and has produced nearly 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.