This reference takes each of the major theories in psychiatry and demonstrates conclusively that it is so flawed as to be beyond salvation. McLaren shows how the phenomena of mental disorder can be described in a parsimonious dualist model which leads directly to a humanist form of management.

A groundbreaking cultural history of the most influential, most frequently translated, and most imitated novel in the world. The year 2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha—an ageless masterpiece that has proven unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into “a knight in skirts.” Freud studied Quixote’s psyche. Mark Twain was fascinated by it, as were Kafka, Picasso, Nabokov, Borges, and Orson Welles. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, movies and video games, and even shapes the identities of entire nations. Spain uses it as a sort of constitution and travel guide; and the Americas were conquered, then sought their independence, with the knight as a role model. In Quixote, Ilan Stavans, one of today’s preeminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and dreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it.

This book is an introduction to the uncertainties and incongruities about madness. It is aimed at all of those who are curious about this subject whether out of general inquisitiveness or because it is part of a formal course of study. Using case studies of real people in order to explain, humanise, and bring to life the subject, Peter Morrall critically analyses how madness has been and is understood, or perhaps misunderstood. By contrasting past and present people who have been perceived as mad and/or perceive themselves as mad, Morrall presents core ideas about madness and critiques their would-be robustness in explaining the specific madness of the person in question, as well as their general relevance to madness overall. Unlike many of its contemporaries, the book does not adhere to a perspective, but rather remains skeptical about the ideas of all who profess to understand madness, whether these emanate from sociology, psychology, psychotherapy, anthropology, ‘anti’ psychiatry, or the biological sciences of contemporary ‘scientific-psychiatry’. This book will inform and stimulate the thinking of the reader, and challenge those with preconceived ideas about madness.

Modern psychiatry has no formal model of mental disorder to guide its daily practice, teaching and research. McLaren offers a rational model of mental disorder within the framework of a molecular resolution of the mind-body problem. This model will have revolutionary consequences for psychiatry--and the mentally afflicted.

People suffering from mental illnesses are among the most vulnerable of our society’s unfortunates. They deserve our support and care. While the clinical care they receive from front-line psychiatrists and other clinicians is generally good in the Western world, better understanding of mental illness is desperately needed. Every year or so sees new diagnoses added to the list of mental disorders, each with cohorts of new patients. Every year or so sees new estimates—ever swelling—of the number of those suffering from mental illness. But does this demonstrate progress? The academics and others who control the psychiatric profession have opted for what they consider an objective approach to comprehending mental illness. Tragically, they have adopted the mantra “Mental Illness is Brain Disease” and have attempted to work with this approach exclusively. Any interest in patients as individual human beings has been put aside; without that connection, we’ve achieved almost no progress in well over a century. According to Dr. Simon A. Brooks, any understanding of what constitutes a mental illness seems to be disappearing. The boundary between “normal” and “pathological” in human behaviour is increasingly blurred. Almost anything can be labelled as a disorder, and psychiatry has no clear idea of which conditions it should be addressing. Even grief can now be stigmatised as depression. Meanwhile the public is sold myths about psychiatry resting upon a secure foundation of neuroscience and that breakthroughs are just around the corner. After a century, how can they still be just around the corner? In this disturbing book, Dr. Brooks analyses the nature and causes of this dangerous divide between practise and reality, using evidence to show why our mental health crisis must be resolved.

During their careers, many students become aware that, lurking in the background, there are complex and conceptually difficult questions that, all too often, their teachers either can't answer, or can't even understand. These are traditionally the questions addressed by philosophy, and this little primer is the result of another student's journey over many years. Niall McLaren MD has spent over three decades banging his head against the Really Difficult questions behind psychiatry, and offers his a personal view of how these questions should be approached. Very deliberately, he simplifies the convoluted language and reasoning that set philosophers apart, making it accessible to students of scientific fields in particular. ÿIn this book, you will gain a background in the following fields: ÿ * Religion and the origins of philosophy ÿ *ÿMentalism, antimentalism and behaviorism ÿ *ÿEpistemology, as the study of knowledge itself ÿ *ÿPhilosophy and the nature of science ÿ *ÿPhilosophy and the nature of ethicsÿ Included is a glossary explaining some of the many "-isms" that can be so daunting to non-philosophers because philosophers too have their jargon but it is not meant to intimidate. True, it can be complex, but the issues involved are complex. The goal of this book is to show that, with clear thinking, the complexities need not be overwhelming. ÿ"This is one of the very few books I have every intention of reading several times in rapid succession. It is such a bounty of iconoclastic observations emanating from an in-depth acquaintance with psychiatry and a love of philosophy that no single reading can do it justice: it just keeps giving." ÿ---Sam Vaknin, PhD, author of "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited" From Future Psychiatry Press www.FuturePsychiatry.com

Dr. Niall (Jock) McLaren is an Australian psychiatrist who uses philosophical analysis to show that modern psychiatry has no scientific basis. This startling conclusion dovetails neatly with the growing evidence that psychiatric drug treatment is crude and damaging. Needless to say, this message is not popular with mainstream psychiatrists. However, in this book, he shows how the principles of information processing give a formal theory of mind that generates a model of mental disorder as a psychological phenomenon.