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The Myth of the Chemical Cure. A Critique of Psychiatric DrugTreatment By Moncrieff Joanna. Macmillan Palgrave. 2009. £18.99 (pb). 320 pp. ISBN:9780230574328
Any challenge to orthodox thinking is to be welcomed, particularly when orthodoxy has failed to provide highly efficacious and acceptable treatments. Such is the case with drugs used in psychiatry – doubts remain about their efficacy when compared with placebo and many drugs' tolerability is poor at best. Perhaps more importantly, psychiatry has a history of championing useless and harmful treatments, so critical examination of accepted practice is essential.
In her book, Moncrieff distinguishes between the current disease-centred model, whose foundation is that drugs correct an abnormal brain state, and her preferred drug-centred model, which supposes that drugs create an altered physical and mental state and that therapeutic effects arise as a consequence of this state. An example of the former would be the use of L-dopa in Parkinson's disease; an example of the latter, alcohol in social anxiety disorder. Moncrieff argues that there is no basis...