Monday, August 01, 2011

More on the treatment of mental illnesses

MindHacks links to an article on Patients and power struggles:
"Medical History has a brief but good article on the political wranglings and scientific battles between psychiatry, psychoanalysis and clinical psychology in 20th Century America."
The article Contested Jurisdictions: Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Clinical Psychology in the United States, 1940–2010 by Andrew Scull also says:
"Publication of the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association proved to be a watershed moment in the evolution of twentieth-century psychiatry. That document, and its subsequent, even more elephantine revisions, marked the advent of the so-called neo-Kraepelinian revolution in psychiatry. Embraced by the insurance industry and linked ever-more tightly to the needs and requirements of the multinational pharmaceutical industry, for whom psychotropic drugs were becoming the single most important and profitable set of products they marketed, it marked the decisive recapture of the profession by a biologically reductionist view of mental disorders."
and earlier
"Psychoanalysis had managed initially to contain the potential threat posed by the drugs revolution, but by the mid-1970s, that resolution was threatening to break down. Antipsychotic drugs had proved to be an enormously lucrative market, and questions were beginning to be raised in many quarters about precisely what therapeutic advantages accrued from adding seemingly interminable and expensive psychoanalytic treatments to the mix. A decade earlier, virtually every academic department of psychiatry was led by a psychoanalyst or a psychoanalytic fellow-traveller, but increasingly, the sums on offer to conduct laboratory research on potentially therapeutic compounds were exercising a powerful appeal, one bolstered by the critical importance of funded research in establishing pecking orders in large research universities."
Two related posts Fascinating book :"Crazy Like Us" and
Scary story

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