Book Store Directory at Therapist-Psychologist.com - Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health

Enter Keywords:

Index : Product Listings : Product Details

Back

View Larger

Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health

By Elliot Valenstein ( Free Press )

Release Date: 2002-02-01
Average Customer Rating:

List Price: $20.95
Price: $18.85
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Add to Cart

Product Description

Over the last thirty years, there has been a radical shift in thinking about the causes of mental illness. The psychiatric establishment and the health care industry have shifted 180 degrees from blaming mother to blaming the brain as the source of mental disorders. Whereas experience and environment were long viewed as the root causes of most emotional problems, now it is common to believe that mental disturbances -- from depression and anxiety to schizophrenia -- are determined by brain chemistry. And many people have come to accept the broader notion that their very personalities are determined by brain chemistry as well.

In his award-winning, meticulously researched, and elegantly written history of psychosurgery, Great and Desperate Cures, Elliot Valenstein exposed the great injury to thousands of lives that resulted when the medical establishment embraced an unproven approach to mental illness. Now, in Blaming the Brain he exposes the many weaknesses inherent in the scientific arguments supporting the widely accepted theory that biochemical imbalances are the main cause of mental illness. Valenstein reveals how, beginning in the 1950s, the accidental discovery of a few mood-altering drugs stimulated an enormous interest in psychopharmacology, resulting in staggering growth and profits for the pharmaceutical industry. He lays bare the commercial motives of drug companies and their huge stake in expanding their markets. Prozac, Thorazine, and Zoloft are just a few of the psychoactive drugs that have dramatically changed practice in the mental health profession. Physicians today prescribe them in huge numbers even though, as several major studies reveal, their effectiveness and safety have been greatly exaggerated.

Part history, part science, part expos�, and part solution, Blaming the Brain sounds a clarion call throughout our culture of quick-fix pharmacology and our increasing reliance on drugs as a cure-all for mental illness. This brilliant, provocative book will force patients, practitioners, and prescribers alike to rethink the causes of mental illness and the methods by which we treat it.

Amazon.com Review
The odds are high that someone close to you has been told he or she has a "chemical imbalance" in the brain, but the odds are slim that the doctor who said it could point to any convincing evidence that it was true. The increasing awareness that most biological theories underlying diagnoses of depression, schizophrenia, and other mental problems are based very loosely on accidental drug discoveries and promoted heavily by pharmaceutical companies is the basis for neuroscientist Elliot S. Valenstein's book Blaming the Brain. Compelling reading for the age of Prozac, Blaming the Brain looks at the history of medical treatments for psychiatric disorders, and particularly the modern era of drug therapies, with the intent of uncovering whether science or rhetoric determines courses of treatment.

Claiming that there are no widely accepted theories of mental illness and that therapies are guided more by marketing than lab work hasn't won Valenstein many friends in psychiatry, but his scientific credibility is impeccable, and, better for the reader, his explanations of his doubts are clear and sensible. Whether discussing the "good old days" of insulin coma and electroshock therapies (after which drugs seemed a humane godsend) or the modern prospects of scientific research and medical clinics owned and directed by pharmaceutical companies, he maintains a calm, measured style that seeks to clothe the emperor, not replace him. Blaming the Brain is a powerful, thoroughly enjoyable book that will provoke much-needed thought and discussion on all sides of this important topic. --Rob Lightner

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the "New Psychiatry"	Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Drugs	The Anti-Depressant Fact Book: What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Luvox	Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill	America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics And How We've Been Deceived

Product Reviews:

Anyone can claim anything
I respectfully disagree with most of the posters who discredit the use of drugs for mental health disease. My wife practices Psychiatry and she never uses a medication, suggested and promoted by the pharm companies, for any patient that the drug companies say is indicated for, unless it works. She very carefully diagnosis the patient and then prescribes a medication that she feel will work. If that medication does not work, after a time to show it doesn't work, then she will prescribe another till the results are achieved. She understand the medications so well that side effects can be controlled by titration in most instances rather than prescribing another medication for the side effects. She has many patients that come to see her that are on a poly pharm of meds and the first thing she does is begin to reduce the meds until they are on the fewest meds possible.
One thing that I will challenge is that any researcher will say just about anything to support their biases. Doctors, MD, don't have all the facts or training to evaluate mental disease and even if they do, a lot of the diagnosis is clinical training and clinical decisions made because of experience or "gut feeling".
She has patients who are schizophrenic, bi-polar, depressed, autistic and many other diseased who cannot function in society and with well chosen medication, return to work, return to school, began to be a contributing member of society.
Anyone who challenges mental health disease in the brain has just as many well known, respected, experts in medicine, neurophysiology, and other fields of medical research that says just the opposite. If the results are often visible in changed behavior, social action, and other behavior action it counters the ideas that medication don't work. Yes most of the older typicals have many problems i.e. side effects but the newer second and third generation atypical medications are doing miracles in remission and healing mental health disease.
Americans live the John Wayne syndrome that says "if you are a man you don't have mental health problems". If one understands the whole body concept and that every human is different, you have to understand that the brain has a chemical basis as any other organ of the body. If chemicals can be disturbed in other organs then why can't a person have brain chemical problems that can be helped by medications that target the areas that elicit the behavior that is disturbed. This understanding is very basic to physiology of the human or any other animal brain or body. I would bet that you don't believe that genes along with hormones contribute to the development of the fetus in gestation. This book denies years of research, especially in the last few years, that show there are chemical disturbances that can and probably cause the behavior that needs to be addressed by the Psychiatric specialist. Regardless of what one believes about the Pharmaceutical industry there have been many medications developed to treat disease that is better understood and now can be treated much better then in the past. Consider diabetes, infection, Gurd, ED, Cancer, and many other disease. Now someone comes along and "dishes" any possibility that the brain, that controls the rest of the body and its behavior, cannot possibly be caused by chemical imbalance. This smacks of the alternative health care industry that advertises that they have the knowledge to heal every disease afflicting humans.
Anyone with an intelligence to not accept anything from any field unless there is adequate supportive evidence that the treatment works and not just anecdotal, can realize that mental health disease can often be healed by proper diagnosis, unique to individual, medication with proper counseling. My wife has seen too many patients that do not want counseling. They are like too many Americans who want just a pill since it is quick and doesn't take the time as both. America has become an "instant fix" culture and that is part of the whole picture.
To sum up: Just because the author and other individuals have advanced degrees is not a surety that that person is the expert and last word.

The most important book I think a person can read.
This is a very important book that I believe all people should read. It is presented from a scientific and historic perspective that isn't painted with human bias but merely a dissection of facts and subsequent conclusions. We're in a world where children and adults are being forced to take brain damaging neuroleptic drugs and in these arguments doctors and parents are discussing it as a medical option, not as a behavioral modification option. Would a parent, counselor, doctor and social services worker still discuss the use of Abilify or Risperdal in a hyperactive, or "bipolar" kid if they knew that what they were really doing was just disabling their brain with dangerous chemicals with long term and even permanent adverse effects; producing a "chemical straight jacket" effect and a myriad of brain damage induced movement disorders, psychological disorders as well as diabetes and numerous factors capable of leading to disability? We could find out if more people read this book.

The truth is that the discovery and use of psychoactive drugs has snowballed into modern mainstream psychiatry as its very foundation but that no human brain needs drugs for mental illness like some diabetics need insulin for blood sugar regardless of negative feelings, thoughts or behavior but that isn't the story we're being told by the National Institute of Mental Health, The American Psychiatric Association, The mass media and the drug companies. Sure, some drugs can have effects on people that may be considered positive by them or their care givers. A anxiety patient may enjoy the relief they get from the sedation effect of a benzodiazapine just as they could with alcohol, a person suffering from depression may experience positive results from a anti depressant just as they could with cocaine, and those having to deal with schizophrenics and bipolars will find the person much easier to manage and more comfortable to be around on the neuroleptics just as if they were lobotomized but that doesn't mean that these are genuine medical issues being treated with proper medicine. These are social, emotional and behavioral issues being treated with drugs.

The argument, all too commonly for those who do believe that mental illness is objective is that with mental illness there are no better alternatives therefor we must work both with and around what we have - drugs. But then this should be seen for what it is and a psychiatrist should have no more authority as given by society and government in treating or supplying information on mental illness than any other branch of medicine that would choose to experiment and consumers should have the freedom to select their own treatment and refuse any treatment. For quite awhile now the public has been told metaphors that the the chemical imbalance in their brains that is causing the mental disorder must be treated with psychiatric drugs that work understandably the same way as treating diabetes with insulin when it is just not true and psychiatrists continue to be viewed by courts, insurance companies and much of society as the medical authority in treating mental illness.

Great Resource for Those Looking for a Critical Review of Biological Research of Psychological Phenomena ( cmburch879 )
Valenstein, a well-recognized, erudite neuroscientists, does an excellent job of deconstructing the econonmic and scientific problematics in biological research and biological understandings of psychologically-related phenomena. _Blaming the Brain_ is a clearly written, well organized exploration of brain science. It reviews research findings as well as confounds related to them. I highly recommend this book to...well, everyone! In fact, I believe that everyone should own a copy!

Rethink that "chemical imbalance" theory ( jlautner )
If you believe that some mental disorders are caused by a "chemical imbalance" you need to read this book. Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health is perhaps the most definitive, heavily-researched, and thoroughly-detailed book on how mental health professionals and the public came to believe in a biological basis for mental disorders and why this belief is ill-founded.

Valenstein, a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, takes us through the history of mental illness treatment from the nineteenth century through the beginning of this one. He explains that his original intent when he began work on the book was to track how views about the basis of mental illness changed over the past fifty years plus. There have been many theories over the years that suggested a biological basis for mental illness, but in the 1940s and 1950s there was a strong belief in the power of psychotherapy alone. Valenstein was curious about how we have come to where we are now, to a commonly-held belief that depression and schizophrenia in particular are caused by chemical imbalances "similar to the imbalance of insulin for those who have diabetes".

The book evolved into more than a history. Valenstein discovered along the way that the basis for this common belief is shaky. What studies there are that seem to support the theory are flawed and can usually not be replicated. Further, too many persons with depression and schizophrenia do not respond to the current drugs. If these drugs actually corrected a problem present in all depressed or schizophrenic patients then we would expect them all to be helped.

Why, then, do so many patients - and doctors - honestly believe such an iffy theory?? Valenstein devotes much of the book to this question and answers it clearly.

Valenstein's research is exhaustive and his caution in interpreting what he learns is admirable. His writing is clear and comprehensible to laypersons but not simplistic. In the end he summarizes his findings and makes clear that he is not saying that nobody should use these drugs. But they should not be used without investigation into alternatives and certainly should not be considered the best option in all cases. His greatest concern - and it should also be ours - is that such a tunnel-visioned view of mental illness is dangerous and will not lead to improvements in care.

Blaming the Brain ( jitterbug042001 )
AWESOME! What everyone should know about medication, drug companies, and how the prescribing game really works.

THE THERAPIST PSYCHOLOGIST BOOK STORE