100 books like Outside Mental Health

“That book changed my life”--when interviewing current and former psychiatric patients (and some critical psychiatrists), no book has so often been described to me in this way.

Anatomy of an Epidemic isn’t about forced treatment per se—it’s about the medications used to forcibly treat people today. An award-winning science journalist (and founder of the web magazine Mad in America for which I sometimes write), Whitaker critically examined every existing study of the long-term impacts of common psychiatric medications from antidepressants and ADHD stimulants to lithium and antipsychotics.

He found that, over time, nearly all psychotropics are associated with serious harms to physical health, quality of life, and cognitive capacity. In the precedent Third Circuit case that first established limited rights for people to decline psychotropics, the court found that “even acutely disturbed patients might have good reason to refuse these drugs.”

Whitaker’s research shows, with alternately disturbing, gruesome, and tragic… show more.

I found Rethinking Madness to be a highly original book. Clinical psychologist Paris Williams interviewed individuals who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses, and he integrated this research with prominent alternative explanations for madness. In contrast to the gloomy picture painted by establishment psychiatry, Williams describes how full recovery from schizophrenia and other related psychotic disorders is not only possible but is surprisingly common, and that many people who recover from these psychotic disorders do not merely return to their pre-psychotic condition, but often undergo a profound positive transformation with far more lasting benefits than harms.

Mad Science is a comprehensive, engaging, and readable scientific and social critique of current mental health practices. It effectively argues that the fundamental claims of modern American psychiatry are based on misconceived, flawed, and distorted science, and it details psychiatry’s scientifically invalid disorders, unreliable diagnostic methods, ineffective drugs, and damaging use of coercion. The authors are scholars, researchers, and clinicians (Kirk, a professor emeritus of social welfare at UCLA; Gomory, an associate professor of social work at Florida State University; and Cohen, a professor in social welfare at UCLA). 

I found Alternatives Beyond Psychiatry to be an extremely helpful collection of reports and alternative approaches from an international cast of mental health professionals, ex-patients, lawyers, and social scientists. Peter Stastny is a psychiatrist, documentary filmmaker, and a founder of the International Network Towards Alternatives and Rights-Based Supports; and Peter Lehmann is the founder of Peter Lehmann Publishing and co-founder of the Association for Protection against Psychiatric Violence. Alternatives Beyond Psychiatry includes exciting alternative visions along with concrete self-help and approaches for professionals.

I’ve long been suspicious of the medical model of mental health.

My own work with people struggling with mental health challenges convinced me that simply regarding them as ‘mentally ill’ and in need of medication was not helpful. The reality I encountered was far more multidimensional, with psychological, social, and spiritual matters being just as important as the biological, if not more so.

This edited collection brings together critical analyses of the medical model from a wide range of authors. The basic message is that we need to rethink conceptions of mental illness and recognize that there is immense potential for discrimination and oppression if these wider aspects are not taken into consideration.

Anyone who doubts the wisdom of the medical model will find this book very informative.

Foucault’s classic 1961 book, History of Madness, was republished in 2006 in its entirety, exposing the serious omissions of the earlier English translation. In its full form, it stands the test of time as a groundbreaking book that exposed the origins of the modern rational self as the product of repeated attempts to understand, exclude, contain, eliminate, and treat ‘madness’. Foucault’s main argument was that since the Renaissance, our understanding of madness shifted from a philosophical phenomenon into an objective medical science. In the Renaissance, madness could still provide wisdom and insight. Yet, during the 17th and early 18th Centuries, numerous institutions of confinement, such as asylums and poor houses, were established to contain both madness and economic redundancy.’

Foucault characterises the modern experience of madness as defined purely by medical science. He claims this perspective is limiting and definitely not a move towards the ‘truth’ of madness. His… show more.

Psychiatric medications are prescribed more judiciously than when my sister first took them, but still many people find them intolerable.

Bergner first encountered mental illness when his younger brother Bob was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after dancing on a ferry to the rhythm of the ocean. Sadly, his parents believed that dancing was a symptom to be eliminated with higher doses of lithium.

Bergner finds two others to share their experiences: a roller derby star turned peer counselor, who heard voices since childhood; and a lawyer who feels doomed to failure despite his achievements in important cases. All three discontinue medication, two of them successfully.

Interspersed with their stories is a short history of psychiatry with a focus on the limitations of neuroscience and serious missteps in psychopharmacology.

The 1840 burial of Napoleon’s remains in the Invalides coincided with the psychiatric admission of fourteen men who claimed they were the real Napoleon, and he lived on yet. A number of Napoleons—or those claiming to be Napoleon’s son—had also emerged during the emperor’s own lifetime, suffering from the recently identified “delusions of grandeur” diagnosis.

Murat offers a larger study of madness and asylums in nineteenth-century France, and the impact of political events, including the French Revolution and the Terror, on psychiatric patients and doctors. Her chapter on “madhouse Napoleons” is particularly intriguing, as it reveals how the ghosts of powerful historical leaders can infiltrate the minds of the disturbed. For me, the book also raises questions about memory and psychology more generally, about why the mad latched onto Napoleon specifically, and how history or historical figures can live on in surprising places.

There is nothing more satisfying than a well-researched story about the history of medicine. 

This shocking story takes place in the mid-twentieth century and centers on Ruth, a hospital administrator whose husband invented the ice pick lobotomy for the treatment of psychiatric illness. As the surgery gains popularity, Ruth soon learns of debilitating complications from the procedure. Could the touted miracle cure be doing more harm than good?

A harrowing and beautiful tale of two sisters growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother. The author describes a fine line between gentle artistic creativity and debilitating mental illness. The reader will come away with a better understanding of how deeply children are affected growing up in a dysfunctional and traumatic environment. A mother's love and a journey to forgiveness teach us the complex meaning of love.