Out Of Its Mind Psychiatry In Crisis A Call For Reform

While millions of patients with severe mental illnesses are neglected, those charged with caring for them are engaged in a troubling debate: Who should treat these patients-and how? On one side are psychoanalysts, on the other are pill-pushing psychiatrists. And on the fringe are neuroscientists, who are learning volumes about the brain but whose discoveries have largely been ignored. Truly, psychiatry is in crisis.In this important book, Harvard psychiatrist J. Allan Hobson and medical journalist Jonathan A. Leonard explore the roots of this predicament and propose, for the first time, the development of a more balanced approach to treatment-neurodynamics-that bridges the worlds of biomedicine, therapy, and neuroscience. Written with passion and informed by decades of experience, Out of Its Mind shows a clear path to reviving psychiatry, providing sound care for millions, and realizing humanity's ancient dream of treating not just the mind or brain alone, but both together.

J. Allan Hobson is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He is the author of The Dreaming Brain, Sleep, Consciousness, Dreaming as Delirium, and The Dream Drugstore. Jonathan A. Leonard, a graduate of Harvard College, is a free-lance medical writer and Contributing Editor of Harvard Magazine. J. Allan Hobson is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He is the author of The Dreaming Brain, Sleep, Consciousness, Dreaming as Delirium, and The Dream Drugstore. Jonathan A. Leonard, a graduate of Harvard College, is a free-lance medical writer and Contributing Editor of Harvard Magazine.