The Mind Gap

[摘要] Getting on for 50 years ago, after his presentation to an undergraduate medical society, I had dinner with William Sargent, the great proponent of insulin therapy, ECT, and psychosurgery. It was not exactly a light-hearted occasion. I don’t think that evidence-based medicine or the transparent reporting of the harms, as well as the possible benefits, of interventions were on anyone’s agenda in those days. Not long before that I had read the subversive work of RD Laing, who viewed psychosis as something else altogether. Labelled an anti-psychiatrist, Laing was a cult figure in the sixties, although his views on the causes and treatments of psychosis appear, from today’s perspective, as weird and muddled. Both men had themselves suffered from mental illness. Yet, in a recent book about depression written from the standpoint of …

[学科分类] 卫生学