Chapter 9. Is Another Psychiatry Possible?
What is the future for psychiatry? A recent Lancet Commission report with that title argued that what was needed was nothing less than a revolution (Bhugra et al., 2017). I agree. But my manifesto for that revolution, though it has some points in common, differs from theirs in many ways. What I argue in this chapter is not ‘anti-psychiatry’ but for a different psychiatry, one that is as research-based, as supported by objective evidence, as is the psychiatry that I have discussed so critically in this book. In particular, my alternative draws on current research in biology and neurobiology, but does so in a different way, starting not with a brain in the lab, but with human organisms in their milieu.
Further, my approach is not anti-psychiatrist, though I do call for a fundamental revision in the role that medically trained personnel should have in helping those who experience mental distress, and a radical shift in their ways of working so that they can address the social determinants of mental distress and not merely seek to manage the effects. And, in consequence of these shifts, I suggest, psychiatry and psychiatrists will have a different relation to politics: another psychiatry is also part of a very different biopolitics.
Rose, Nikolas. Our Psychiatric Future (p. 173). Wiley. 2018, Kindle edition.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1E5Oyr5YN4xutS9GgZs1GRXVXMEYFvi6Q?usp=sharing
