It is hard to review a book like this without being dismissive or irritated by the author's remorselessly negative view of psychiatry. But this isn't just about us. It is a critique of what you might call ‘big psy’ – anyone who provides any sort of service that claims to deal with people with psychological difficulties. Newnes lays about his colleagues in clinical psychology with equal vigour. Much of his ire seems to me to be based on logical fallacies: bad practice exists, therefore it is professionally desired; one psychiatrist he knows is a fool, therefore all are fools. ECT is ‘electrocution’, which is rather like describing surgery as butchery. Those statements leave out quite a lot of important truth.
What particularly irks Newnes is the reduction of ‘helping’ to a series of depersonalised techniques, so those of us who qualify as patients become the objects of technical expertise (psychiatric or psychological) rather than being engaged as partners in helping relationships. Here I think he is right, but I am not sure about his remedies. An oath for clinical psychologists? The Hippocratic version has never stopped doctors from misbehaving. An emphasis on the possibility of suing clinical psychologists for the future harm their ‘labelling’ may cause? I am not sure that the idea of shouldering blame for the actions of others really holds water. More of an emphasis on human rights legislation? Newnes conceives this as mainly a way of reining in psychiatry, but it is certainly something that psychiatrists could engage with more actively, not least because our patients can use such legislation to improve their circumstances.
So, who might profit from this volume? For all of us it is a good example of an anti-psychiatry rhetoric that has rather gone out of fashion. However, in spite of its many flaws, it can spur us to examine more critically what we do and to explore how helping relationships can be nourished rather than crushed by the ‘psy’ system.
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