About the Book: Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry
The first attempt in a generation to explain the whole subject of psychiatry, from the UKs leading expert
The aim of this book is to give an understanding of what psychiatry is, what it can do and what it cannot do. For good or ill, psychiatry is a polemical battleground, critcised on the one hand as an instrument of social control or a barbaric practice, while on the other the latest devleopements in neuroscience are trumpeted as offering lasting solutions to mental illness. Which of these strikingly contrasting positions should you believe? Is it perhaps possible to believe both? If the solutions to these most distressing of human problems really are so clear and so tantalizingly close, how can psychiatrists continue to get it so wrong? In this deeply thoughtful, descriptive and sympathetic book, Tom Burns reviews the historical development of psychiatry.
What is clear is that mental illnesses are intimately tied to that which makes us human in the first place and have always followed us. The drive to relieve this suffering is even more human.
Psychiatry, for all its flaws, currently represents our best attempts to discharge this most human of impulses. It is not something we can just ignore or decide to leave. It is our necessary shadow.
