Hippocrates Cried
The Decline of American Psychiatry
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Hippocrates Cried offers an eye-witness account of the decline of American psychiatry by an experienced psychiatrist and researcher. Arguing that patients with mental disorders are no longer receiving the care they need, Dr. Taylor suggest that modern psychiatrists in the U.S. rely too heavily on the DSM, a diagnostic tool that fails to properly diagnose many cases of mental disorder and often neglects important conditions or symptoms. American psychiatry has come to reflect simplistic algorithms forged by pharmaceutical companies, rather than true scientific methodology. Few professionals have a working knowledge of psychopathology outside of what is outlined in the DSM, and more mental health patients are being treated by primary care physicians than ever before.
Dr. Taylor creates a passionate yet scholarly account of this issue. For psychiatrists and researchers, this book is a plea for help. Combining personal vignettes and informative data, it creates a powerful illustration of a medical field in turmoil. For the general reader, Hippocrates Cried will provide a fresh perspective on an issue that rarely receives the attention it requires. This book strips American psychiatry of its modern misconceptions and seeks to save a form of medicine no longer rooted in science.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A neuropsychiatric clinician and professor with 45 years of experience, Taylor finds that the contemporary theory and practice of psychiatry has lost its way. He launches a full-throated attack on the still influential Freudian view of the psychodynamic basis of psychopathology, insisting instead that the brain must be "treated as a body organ and not a metaphysical mind." Among Taylor's targets are faddish and vague diagnoses: the number of people classed as bipolar is up 40-fold in the past 30 years, while "borderline personality disorder" has become the "somewhat polite term" psychiatrists use when "they think the patient is unpleasant." He also criticizes psychopharmacology's reliance on "trial and error," the underutilization of electroconvulsive therapy in treating severe depression versus the use of less effective antidepressants, and the reality that many psychiatrists, by refusing Medicaid payments, avoid treating the poor. Occasionally, Taylor delivers harsh rhetorical broadsides "Most brands of psychotherapy... don't work" or digresses from his main topic, as in a discussion of early signs of Alzheimer's in Ronald Reagan during his first debate with Jimmy Carter in 1980. Whether Taylor is correct that biologically based neuropsychiatry will someday subsume psychiatry, his provocative book will give many clinicians and trainees considerable pause.
