Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry

Series

• Corporealities: Discourses of Disability

Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry looks at contemporary psychiatric practice from a variety of critical perspectives ranging from Michel Foucault to Donna Haraway. This contribution to the burgeoning field of medical humanities contends that psychiatry's move away from a theory-based model (one favoring psychoanalysis and other talk therapies) to a more scientific model (based on new breakthroughs in neuroscience and pharmacology) has been detrimental to both the profession and its clients. This shift toward a science-based model includes the codification of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to the status of standard scientific reference, enabling mental-health practitioners to assign a tidy classification for any mental disturbance or deviation. Psychiatrist and cultural studies scholar Bradley Lewis argues for "postpsychiatry," a new psychiatric practice informed by the insights of poststructuralist theory.

Praise / Awards

• "It is not very often that we find a single voice with the ability to bridge clinical experience and scholarly investigation and, in doing so, find clarity and a vision that speaks to a broad audience. Bradley Lewis is that voice, coming to us as an advocate, provider, and consumer of psychiatric medicine as well as a scholar of philosophical and sociocultural thought."
  —New England Journal of Medicine

• "Firmly ensconced in the biopsychiatry age, wherein wonder drugs like Prozac have revolutionized psychiatric care, and the advent of neuroscience has convinced psychiatric researchers that mental illnesses are essentially diseases best understood via the medical model, Bradley Lewish writes a book colling for the urgent need of a new academic discipline of 'Postpsychiatry.' In Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry, Lewis diagnoses how the field of psychiatry has walled itself off from external or internal critiques of its methodological practices, eclectic approaches to healing mental illness, and the cultural studies exposes of the political maneuvers of the pharmaceutical industry responsible for the paradigm shift in biopsychiatry."
  —Metapsychology Online Reviews