Description
“THE PSYCHIATRISTS is a comprehensive inquiry into the scope, influence, and future of psychiatry in the United States. What emerges is a close-up portrait of the American psychiatrist/ psychoanalyst in a time of crisis and transition for his profession. Based on questionnaires, interviews, psychiatric publications, and much popular literature, the book boldly confronts the major problems not only of the psychiatric world but of American society today and finds that the two are in many ways synonymous. Certainly this unique book is bound to stir controversy. Much of what it says has long been recognized as true within the field, but here it is presented to the general public for the first time. Indeed it is the only major attempt ever made to find out what attitudes psychiatrists themselves hold and how their personal values shape and influence the psychiatric process and the goals of the patient. Equally original and relevant is the careful distinction between the beliefs and approaches of psychiatrists and those of psychoanalysts, between doctors who work primarily in a hospital and those in private practice. In the process, the author deals with the means by which patients are selected, the kinds of patients to whom the doctor himself responds, and the social and cultural factors that wrongly lead some patients to be neglected or pronounced incurable. Perhaps the most startling chapter of all is the one entitled ‘ America as the Patient?,’ which explores the relatively new concept that much mental illness is the result of social conditions and which – in investigating alienation, protests, divorce, sex and drugs in contemporary America- raises the question of what really is ‘normal’ by today’s standards. Nowhere are many of the basic dilemmas of psychiatry better shown than in the professional reactions to modern theories that are critical of Freudian principles and psychiatric concepts of ‘mental health.’ The discussion of the organization and role of the American Psychiatric Association and of the leading professional bodies, inevitably leads to an appraisal of the maverick practitioner and of the splinter groups that keep forming and re-forming across the country. But as the book points out, the question for the future is not only whether psychiatry itself as presently practiced is becoming superfluous. For the greatest strides forward are not being taken in theory but in the use of drugs, computers, and other innovations in treatment. In the coming decades will psychiatry assume an alarming, Big Brother role in the lives of most Americans or will it, in fact, be relegated to the alchemic scrap heap as a more exact science supersedes it? This is but the final provocative question that THE PSYCHIATRISTS poses. Along the way it provides information and raises challenges for every thinking American.”- Publisher.
317 pages. Softcover. In good to very good condition.
