Book Section: Essays and Review: Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition

Abstract

The author of this book appears to have a loose philosophical affiliation with the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960’s, with i ts American champions, Thomas Szasz, MD (a psychiatrist) and Thomas Scheff, Ph.D. (a sociologist). While Breggin—himself a psychiatrist—does not go as far as Szasz and Scheff in their wholesale denunciations of psychiatry, he does nibble around the edges of that discipline. He also adds the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Inst i tute of Mental Health (NIMH), pharmaceutical companies, and many psychotropic agents themselves to his target list. This is Dr. Breggin’s eighteenth book: Like most of the others, this one is also devoted to the negative effects of drugs as used in psychiatric practice, and to excoriating the drug companies and the government.