My childhood was marred by change and a search for meaning. Born in the UK to an English mother and Iraqi father, moving to Iraq as a toddler and then back to the UK as a 14-year-old, I was exposed to the dramatic differences in the unwritten rules of how we are meant to behave and experience the world. It was probably inevitable that after training as a doctor, I would eventually end up as a child and adolescent psychiatrist grappling with big questions about life and its struggles. These are the books that opened my mind to re-imagining these dilemmas. I hope they help to open yours, too.
I was already familiar with Robert Whitakerâs work, but this one blew me away.
It is meticulously researched with personal stories that bring theory into its real-world relevance. I think I read it in two sittings as I was gripped by the power of his thesis: The proliferation in the use of psychiatric drugs is causing a dramatic worsening of Americansâ mental health rather than improving it.
Until then, I hadnât come across a book on this theme that was so clearly and carefully argued and referenced.
Updated with bonus material, including a new foreword and afterword with new research, this New York Times bestseller is essential reading for a time when mental health is constantly in the news.
In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades?
Interwoven with Whitakerâs groundbreaking analysis of the merits of psychiatric medications are the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. As Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, other societies haveâŚ
He was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, political activist, philosopher, and a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front involved in the fight against French colonialism. He sadly died following a short illness when he was just 36 years old. He wrote two seminal books that had a profound effect on my understanding of the psychological impact of discrimination and colonisation on both the coloniser and the colonised.
I found his writing to have a visceral quality, and having come from a colonised country (Iraq) to live in the coloniser country (Britain), I could "feel" in my body and mind the psychodramas he was describing.
First published in 1961, Frantz Fanonâs The Wretched of the Earth is a masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle. In 2020, it found a new readership in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and the centering of narratives interrogating race by Black writers. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in spurring historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities onâŚ
I havenât come across a clearer and easier to read account of how psychiatry became the modern version of colonial missionaries "educating" the âbackward,â âuncivilizedâ world.
By examining Western biomedical models of mental health and how they are communicated, he shows how existing and helpful local approaches are erased by colonizers portraying them as âuneducated superstitions.â
Coming from the global south myself, the story examples that Watters describes resonated not only with my academic understanding but also with my personal experience. Western mental health ideology is inherently imperialist, and Ethan Watters will help you appreciate why.
âA blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering Americaâs role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healingâ (Po Bronson).
In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documentedâŚ
A poetic book that brought me into the meaningful world of the "mental patient."
Hornsteinâs beautifully written book compels us not to dismiss the stories that patients are trying to tell. I was mesmerized by the examples in this book, in particular that of Agnes Richter, a German woman who stitched tiny, almost indecipherable, autobiographical texts into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform.
This book is a tribute to the capacity of the human spirit and our need to tell our stories of suffering.
I first read this book in 1987, when I was a fourth-year medical student. This is the book that really sparked my interest in psychiatry.
It opened my eyes to the possibility that even those in the most disturbed state of mind experience meaningful and understandable human dilemmas. Itâs as fresh and relevant today as it was when it was first published six decades ago. A deeply humane text that humanizes the most disenfranchised and lost of our human family.
Presenting case studies of schizophrenic patients, Laing aims to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible. He also offers an existential analysis of personal alienation.
Today, mental health diagnoses are everywhere. Searching for Normal unpacks a staggering counterclaim: most of what weâve been told about mental health simply isnât, and believing it harms us. Instead of true healthcare, our mental health models can be described as the Mental Health Industrial Complexâa system profiting off human suffering. The surge of neurodivergence diagnoses stems from this system, which seeks to replace real stories and relationships with medical scripts, leaving patients disempowered and collecting unhelpful labels and treatments.
There is hope, and healing begins with an end to pathologizingâpsychiatric labels are not the end of the story. Normal argues for replacing this medical model with a holistic, relational approach to treating people, not diagnoses, by reclaiming emotional life from institutional control.
