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Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health By William Glasser ( Harper Paperbacks )
Release Date: 2004-04-01
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Product Description
How psychopharmacology has usurped the role of psychotherapy in our society, to the great detriment of the patients involved. William Glasser describes in Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health the sea change that has taken place in the treatment of mental health in the last few years. Millions of patients are now routinely being given prescriptions for a wide range of drugs including Ritalin, Prosac, Zoloft and related drugs which can be harmful to the brain. A previous generation of patients would have had a course of psychotherapy without brain–damaging chemicals. Glasser explains the wide implications of this radical change in treatment and what can be done to counter it.
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 Great book on choice theory
well recommended from councelor and great book on therapy without drugs.
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One of my favorite self help books
This, along with "Choice Theory" by the same author are probably my favorite self help books. Do you want an alternative way of dealing with the problems in your life? Try these books. I read many self help books, primarily related to Adlerian Psychology, and these are my favorites.
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 Overly simplistic - not the information I was looking for ( jaxkitten )
The cover of this book jumped out at me - I was expecting more of an analysis of the psychiatric profession and the methods used over the years. Instead, what I got was a long plug for his own method - Choice Theory.
I have worked with chronically "mentally ill" people for over five years now and have seen cases where medication helped people with schizophrenia make a complete turnaround. No, not every person with schizophrenia wants or needs to take medication, but it can help. Mental illness is a very complex problem. While I also don't like the drug-centered nature of the mental health field, I don't think there is ONE RIGHT way to address mental health problems. I resent reading a book and getting the message that the author's way is the only way. Life is not that simple.
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 lots of opinions and guesses, few facts ( jg007 )
The cover and overviews make reference to Glasser's book being supported by facts. So, I was looking forward to it. Unfortunately, it is short on facts and long on his opinions.
Such as where he states that "PERHAPS up to 50% of schizophrenics recover without medical help." Perhaps??? That's a very glib statement supported by a "perhaps."
In one case where he cites a health statistic, it covers the period "from the 1930s to the 1990s" and is used to discredit medications. His citing of such shows a disregard for evidence or his being terribly out of date in the medical field. I suspect it is the latter. Information from the 1930s and 40s and 50s?? That was the "dark ages" for most all medications, let alone for psychiatric medications which have only begun to have treatment break throughs in the 1990s. Referencing info from then is like saying "we proved in 1805 that mankind could not build airplanes that fly, so why don't people stop trying to build them."
A careful reading of what is written and how it is written seems to indicate that he has reached a foregone conclusion and is picking and choosing some evidence to support his opinion. But mainly he uses argument and rhetoric to support it.
Don't bother with this book. It's another one of those "I'm the only man in the world who knows anything, so buy my book."
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Exposes the Myth of Psychiatry ( rpeders3 )
Some of the psychiatrists or psychiatrists in training that have reviewed this book are sadly influenced by the ideologies and pressupositions of their industry. The fact is, science has never proven that there is such a thing as a non-organic mental illness. The reason why people behave the way they do and have a variety of symptoms is far more complex than "they are lacking some serotonin." Most psychiatrists have already bought into the myth of chemical imbalance as CAUSATIVE of illness. Deep down they have to know this is a leap, if they are truly honest (the human mind is too complex to reduce to single neurotransmitters). Glasser and others have pointed out this leap for years. It is in the best interest of the patient to be honest with them and to genuinely help them get better and live better lives, not just hand them a prescription and say, "See you in a month." Drugs can be helpful for some but they are not the CURE of anything.
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Addiction
