thorough I do not agree with all the positions defended by the author (and indeed, recent studies have not been kind with some of the proposals defended at the time by the author--to cite one example, there does not seem to be empirical support for a "bad-me" vs "poor-me" typology of paranoia). This said, the goal of a new science is not to get it right, but to conduct experimental research with a critical judgment of its limits, and on this regards, Madness Explained offers a challenging and critical stand on "schizophrenia" that no clinical nor researcher in the field should ignore.
Very Interesting An excellent, but somewhat contradictory book. It attempts to explain the symptoms (and causes) of mental illness in the language of psychology (rather than in the medicalised terms of psychiatry).
As we know, the 'son' psychology has a difficult relationship with the 'father' psychiatry. Consequently, unable to plunge the Oedipal dagger, the author has to adopt many of the definitions and arbitrary demarcations of the medical model of mental illness that are so ably debunked in the early chapters.
The book thus has two interleaved parts that could have been separated into distinct volumes: A robust critique of the (neo) Kraeplinian approach to the diagnosis of mental illness; and an attempt to use the tools and language of academic psychology to construct a model of mental illness / psychosis.
It's about time for a book like this! Informative and in-depth, without being dry, stuffy and jargon-y like many psychology/psychiatry books are. Don't be intimidated by the size of this book, it's a very easy read and well-written. The author even manages to inject some humor every now and then. It's a great explaination of the theories and history of schizophrenia, bipolar and unipolar, with an emphasis on schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders.
The author goes into detail about the history of psychology and psychiatry, and names a lot of people I've never heard of. We've all heard of Freud, but what about Kraepelin, Bleuler, Laing or Mosher? I also like that the author gives a nod to the antipsychiatry movement, and has no holds barred about discussing the history of facism, the Nazi regime in psychiatry, and abuse of psych ward patients in history.
The thing I like most about this book is it humanizes people we would otherwise be inclined to write off and discard because they are 'insane'. This should be required reading for anyone studying psychology or psychiatry.
Outstanding, well-researched treatise An outstanding, research-based treatise exploring the precise mechanisms of mental illness, and the thin line separating "normal" from "abnormal" functioning. Bentall meticulously debunks the labels upon which the dominant understanding of mental illness rely, such as "schizophrenia" and "manic depression." Experiences such as delusions and voices are things to which we are all vulnerable, and Bentall explains just why and how this is so. I really enjoyed the chapters exploring research on depression, mania, delusions, paranoia, and hallucinations.
This book is a dense 640 pages, so it is not for the casual reader. For a lighter reading on much the same topics, I would also recommend Bentall's co-authored text, Models of Madness: Psychological, Social, and Biological Approaches to Schizophrenia.
Insights From Experimental Clinical Psychology The philosopher Karl Jaspers, who was trained as a psychiatrist, made a distinction between `understanding' and `explaining' madness. He argued that in the case of psychoses, the most severe form of mental illness, no attempt should be made at understanding what appears as incoherent speech or meaningless behavior by investigating a patient's background and making sense of what he has to say. Rather, psychologists should try to explain psychotic behavior by dividing patients into discrete categories and establishing causal links that should ultimately point towards brain malfunctions or genetic defects.
Richard Bentall shows us that attempts to explain and to understand mental symptoms are inextricably linked. Rather than postulating an unambiguous dividing line between the mentally sane and the insane, he proposes that irrational beliefs and abnormal behaviors manifested by psychotic patients can be seen as the far end of a continuum on which people are distributed. The differences between those who are diagnosed as suffering from a psychiatric disorder and those who are not amount to relatively little, and these differences appear to be understandable when viewed in the context of what we know about normal human psychology.
The classification of psychiatric disorders into neuroses (such as benign forms of depression or phobias) and psychoses (such as manic depression and schizophrenia) dates back to Emil Kraepelin and a number of Karl Jaspers' contemporaries. Although the concepts originally formulated by German psychiatrists at the turn of the twentieth century underwent a series of transformations, the idea that psychiatric disorders fall into a finite number of categories remain the organizing principle for psychiatric practice and research, as evidenced by the successive editions of the DSM diagnostic manual. For Bentall, these classifications have little more scientific value than astrological predictions based on zodiac signs. According to his rather extreme contention, we should abandon psychiatric diagnoses altogether and instead try to explain and understand the actual experiences and behaviors of psychotic people.
Bentall then moves on to show how psychological research can cast light on phenomena such as hallucinatory voices, depressed mood, delusional beliefs, manic episodes and incoherent speech. For each of these `complaints', he provides simple models or psychological mechanisms framed in ways that can be tested experimentally. Once the various psychotic complaints have been explained in this way, Bentall claims that the ghostly conundrum of madness evaporates: the complaints (particular classes of behaviors and experiences that have been singled out because they sometimes cause distress) are all there is. Madness is explained.
Or is it? Some readers may argue that experimental clinical psychology only scratches the surface and does not allow us to delve into the depths of the human psyche, as psychoanalysis has accustomed us to do. To this, Bentall would object, first, that he uses some of the insights of psychoanalysis as working hypotheses in his models and, second, that theories that cannot be tested experimentally are not worth considering. Karl Popper, not Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung, is his intellectual hero.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tailipoe
Trevor
