Fans pick 25 books like Doctors of Deception

Whenever I feel trapped, I think about this book. Told in the first person, it brought me into the asylum and locked me in there with the other patients, and even once I finished reading it, I didn’t feel completely free.

There’s something I like to call “Hollywood Mental Illness.” Movies tend to sugarcoat mental disorders and make them seem fun and entertaining. This book does nothing of the sort. I felt the isolation, the fear, and the sheer panic that these characters faced, like a huge, heavy ball in the pit of my stomach and a zigzagging anxiety that repeatedly paced across my mind. What makes it so dark and frightening is that it’s routed in so much truth, which makes it such a compelling story.

There is an uncomfortable question in the world of mental health and treatment that everyone thinks about, but no one says out loud: If medicating mental illness with psychiatric drugs was really working, why are people getting worse?

This book examines over fifty years of research to find the answer and comes to a startling conclusion. I think it is the single most comprehensive and explanatory book on the market about the true nature and outcomes of psychiatric drugs and that it should be required reading in all medical schools.

It is also divided into multiple diagnoses (schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, and ADHD), which I found particularly useful as someone who focuses mostly on the history and treatment of depression.

Lawyer Michael Perlin was, for decades, lead author of the seminal, annually updated reference volumes on developments in U.S. mental health laws and precedent commitment cases.

The Hidden Prejudice is written for general readers; many pages are still two-thirds reference footnotes, but Perlin allows himself a more personal tone that makes the core text riveting and disturbing.

Dispelling out-of-date notions that people can only be locked up if they’re physically threatening and dangerous, Perlin demonstrates with stark warning how criteria for detaining people have become shockingly broad, most judges have abandoned any requirement that psychiatrists meet even basic standards of science, average commitment hearings function virtually outside the law, and courts grant psychiatric institutions horrifying degrees of immunity for abuses.

You’ll never again hear calls to expand forced psychiatric treatment in the same way.

Hatch did stellar research to expose how coercive psychiatric treatment—especially tranquilization with heavy antipsychotics—is spreading into nursing homes, child foster care and juvenile facilities, immigration centers, and prisons.

Antipsychotics are becoming a ‘go-to’ approach for institutional management of large populations, especially targeting people of color.

Hatch’s work also draws attention to a vital, related issue: Abundant research shows that involuntary treatment is driven by our culture’s dominant prejudices: classism, racism, sexism, sanism, etc. Predictably then, public discussions of involuntary treatment routinely lack, and desperately need, a greater diversity of voices.

So, while highlighting the work of the Black scholar Hatch, I want to also mention several recent anthologies that bring forth a fantastic diversity of voices and perspectives on contempory psychiatric care, forced treatment, and alternatives: Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies; Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, and We've… show more.

I love this because, in many ways, it is a kind of modern take on Sargasso Sea, with a liberal dash of Catcher in the Rye thrown into the soup: an exploration of what happens when you apply the same kinds of patriarchal oppression and expectations Antoinette suffered in the 19th century to a young 20th-century woman living in what is supposedly a more “progressive” and “modern” era.

Esther Greenwood’s unraveling is both brutally relatable and unexpectedly humorous at points, and there are images from it that are so starkly drawn that they stay embedded in your mind like glass shards after an explosion. It’s a modern classic for a reason. 

I was fourteen when I was introduced to my next pick. Our teacher read aloud The Kool-Aid Wino and The Cleveland Wrecking Yard, and I was lucky enough to find a copy at the mall as I read, bang! Trout Fishing in America Terrorists, bang! The Hunchback Trout, and bang! Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?

Brautigan grew up neglected and received involuntary electroshock treatments because he was hungry and threw a rock through a police station window. He never went to college but taught college classes. His imagination gave him a reason to live. It gave me one, too.

When my book club read this, we were universally blown away by Augusten Burroughs’ humor. Mining his tumultuous childhood, Burroughs paints a vivid and unforgettable picture of life with the ultimate dysfunctional family.

I went on to read the author’s other memoirs, and while I always enjoy his one-of-a-kind spin on the world, this remains my favorite of his works.

Art Janov's book, The Primal Scream and its follow-up Primal Therapy, provided a means of breaking down the walls of this mental prison, by expressing the sheer sense of helplessness you feel when the world is presented to you as a screaming baby. In my case this was the stunned silence that I later learned was autism and the little professor syndrome, which meant keeping your eyes open and your mouth shut, in order to understand the strange interplay I saw expressed before me. Meaningless shouting and screaming at the frustration of what I faced was a new experience for me.

After years of being misdiagnosed and wrongly medicated, and after years of living in denial about my bipolar disorder, I began Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) in 2017. And it saved my life. Linehan has created an evidence-based treatment program that has taught me mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation, and distress tolerance. Frankly speaking, I think DBT should be taught in elementary and high schools.

There’s so much to love about this book, a comprehensive guide with information from leading experts like Dr. Lester Grinspoon and Dr. Andrew Weil. Written by a leading psychiatrist, it covers everything from the physiological and psychological effects of cannabis to the politics surrounding its vilification and its re-emergence as medicine. This book was a breakthrough when it was published in 2010—before adult use had been legalized anywhere—and it has become a classic.