THE PSYCHIATRIC FIX: Psychiatry's Alarming Power Over Our Lives

No wonder psychiatry suffers from a ""siege mentality."" Here, psychiatrists are alternately pictured as pompous megalomaniacs who can't understand why a hospitalized patient should ""get involved in a treatment decision""; or, as Frankenstein clones who torture the unsuspecting with electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomies, and the like; or, as corrupt partners in drug company schemes to snatch the ""Superbucks"" from overmedicated patients (especially women and the elderly). It's not the facts and figures, however, that do the real hatchet job in a book like this; many of those are verifiable (until recently, for instance, organized psychiatry did count homosexuality a disease for which it must find a ""cure""). Rather, it's the hysterical editorializing implicit in conversations (real or imagined?) between 80-year-old candidate-for-commitment George and the nitwits who do his psychological testing; or, the eulogy to a baboon-turned-vegetable via electroconvulsive therapy: ""So much for the mountains of Africa adolescent sex drive, and running with his tribe."" Whether psychiatrists--some, all, or most--really do have too much power over too many ""inappropriate areas"" of our lives is impossible to tell from this hopelessly biased account.