Truth-telling in psychiatry

I mentioned in a recent post on my Relational Psychiatry blog that Awais Aftab's edited book Conversations in Critical Psychiatry has just been published. As I said there, Robin Murray (who I have mentioned in a previous post) wrote the foreword to the book. He repeats that he wishes he had not followed "the fashion of the herd" and adhered "to the prevailing orthodoxies" in his psychiatric career. As I said in my previous post, it's not surprising he did, as he had a very successful career, whereas I was suspended twice during my working life. 

Critics of psychiatry, such as myself, still struggle to get our message across. As I said in my interview with Awais in my book chapter in his edited book, there's little evidence that critical/relational psychiatry has changed psychiatry. I struggled in my medical training, giving up in the middle for 8 years, because I couldn't make sense of the overmedicalisation of psychiatry (see eg. my Mad in America Radio interview and my talk given not long before I was first suspended - about which there is more information in a Times Higher Education article). Although there are critics of psychiatry that want to see psychiatry as non-medical, my position has always been that psychiatry is a branch of medicine and that it needs to move on from the reductionism of biomedicine (see eg. my article).

The problem is that there are powerful vested interests in mainstream psychiatry that do not want to fully take on board this need for change. Robin wants to inspire "thoughtful reflection and foster a spirit of collaboration and mutual respect, ultimately leading to better care for those that we serve". I couldn't agree more but it's difficult to see how psychiatry can or will change. Its current institutional crisis of fragmentation and dysfunction may bring the matter to a head (see eg. previous post on my Relational Psychiatry blog) but the likelihood is that psychiatry will continue with more of the same. How the power dynamics of psychiatry can change is uncertain.