Psychopathology: Foundations for a Contemporary Understanding

Rating:
Summary: Handbook for the New Clinicians
Review: I am a retired psychologist-psychoanalyst, my specialization since 1964: schizophrenia. I bought the Maddux book as the title sounded innocent enough, & the publisher is quite reputable. I read the chapter on schizophrenia, a subject on which I have written a book, which I hope will be published soon. I didn't throw up, but maybe would have felt better if I had.
Schizophrenia, it is announced at the outset, is an incurable brain disease, even though there are no physiological changes in the brain differentiable from those seen in PTSD. The treatment of choice, it is further reported, is the latest (therefore most expensive) medications, with additional meds to muffle the side effects of the first when required. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is also recommended (a wonderful term, you can tell just what it means by what it omits: feeling, & meaning. What if a patient appears cured? Do not be fooled! Sly deviants that they are, they are only in remission. The bibliography was barely believable. Few citations were much over a decade old, I suppose this to show us how up to date we all are now; the giants of our field over the last 100 years were almost totally absent, as if they had never been at all. This is cutting-edge 1880s psychology, together with the contemporary managed care-big pharmaceutical (they're the folks who visit hospitals & distribute the latest editions of textbooks they approve of to psychiatric residents free, with other perks)-biological psychiatry coalition. The book is addressed to the New Clinicians, who treat insurance policies, not patients, who provide the personnel for the "industrialization of psychotherapy" advertised by managed care companies, maximizing thruput of patient material through the hospital industrial system with maximal efficiency, minimal cost (to themselves), minimal time, minimal expenditure of resources, then take the money and run, cagily to invest it. A sad testimonial to how far our field has fallen, and how fast. I read with a pencil, so I couldn't return it, so I took it downstairs to the garbage room. I couldn't bear to have it in my home.