Psychiatry's Incurable Hubris

Interesting and relevant book review: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/mind-fixers-anne-harrington/583228/

 

and in the same issue this: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/

 

I find this review puzzling. The book seems to give the impression that psychiatrists are actually being quite humble in admitting that they have no mechanistic explanations for their illnesses. Towards the end the reviewer makes woolly comments suggesting that maybe there is no biological mechanism - that maybe it's all 'psychosocial'? That seems to me to be the hubris - the idea that there is some alternative psychosocial explanation for significant mental illness. How does psychosocial make you wake early with recurrent thoughts or have hallucinations?

I think the psychiatrists are right. They are still desperately looking for mechanisms.

 

I came across the article when browsing the Atlantic (covers similar ground to the New Statesman or Spectator but in my opinion with better writers).

The reviewer Gary Greenberg is a psychotherapist, where as the author Anne Harrington is an academic in the History of Science with particular reference to Psychiatry & Neuroscience). Whether Anne Harrington has a medical degree I have no idea!

So the reviewer as a pychotherapist presumably believes in behavioural interventions & takes great delight in accounts of the past failures of psychiatry.

Is the book a good read for the lay person? I don't know