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Models of Madness is the first book in the International Society for the Psychological Treatments of the Schizophrenias and Other Psychoses (ISPS) series. The book's editors, John Read, Loren Mosher and Richard Bentall, alongside contributors from six countries and a variety of backgrounds (including a user of services), have a clear purpose in mind - to end what they describe as the ‘madness’ of biological psychiatry.
The book is structured into three parts. The first part critiques the illness model of ‘schizophrenia’, and passionately challenges the perceived stranglehold that simplistic biological ideology has over mental health services. Read contributes to eight of the 10 chapters in this first part, and his presence guides the reader into a coherent and powerful analysis of the dominant belief that psychotic illness is a biological illness like any other. History, politics and economics are shown to have had much more influence on the development of the concept of schizophrenia than objective evidence. The doctrine that schizophrenia is a chronic, severe and disabling brain disease is shown to possess neither validity nor reliability. Chapters re-examine the research evidence for the aetiology of psychosis, and dispute the key importance of constitutional factors, such as genetics.
The editors contend that the acceptance of a simplistic biogenetic ideology is directly responsible for the unwarranted and destructive pessimism in the treatment of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. An important link is made between this biological pessimism and the modern-day enthusiasm and readiness to use routinely treatments such as antipsychotic medications, despite their extensive side-effects. However, in what I consider to be a step too far, Read and Jeffrey Masson present a chapter that suggests this therapeutic nihilism within psychiatry provided fertile ground for eugenics in many countries, and mass murder in Nazi Germany.
The final contribution to this part is by