Corporealities: Discourses of Disability: Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry (ePub)

"Interesting and fresh-represents an important and vigorous challenge to a discipline that at the moment is stuck in its own devices and needs a radical critique to begin to move ahead."
—Paul McHugh, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

"Remarkable in its breadth-an interesting and valuable contribution to the burgeoning literature of the philosophy of psychiatry."
—Christian Perring, Dowling College

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.