The Harmony of Illusions

Rating:
Summary: Is there a doctor in the house?
Review: Sir, When you get yourself a degree then maybe just maybe I may think about buying this trash. Until that time from my readings PTSD has been tracked for over a century and a half ...so whats your problem? Get rich quick scams....only in America.

Rating:
Summary: In reponse to my intemperate fellow Bostonian
Review: This is a groundbreaking study of a "condition" whose popularity has grown way out of proportion to the limited evidence for its validity as a clinical entity. PTSD fits a profession's need for a "serious" mental disorder that requires psychotherapy as its primary mode of treatment, at a time when medications have come to be seen as the primary treatment from most Axis I psychiatric disorders. Just as importantly it meets the needs of patients who need a "reason" (or perhaps a "culprit") to account for their misery other than the mere fact of being ill. However, close study of the condition itself reveals that there is nothing intrinsic which distinguishes it from garden variety depression with prominent anxiety and intrusive rumination. It has been known since time immemorial that such conditions will arise independently of the issues which may occupy the minds of their sufferers. But now, as a consequence of the socio-historical milieu into which PTSD was born, it has become the favored diagnosis for those who see their emotional troubles as the responsibility of someone else. In this book the nature of that historical milieu is well described. Professor Young has broken a powerful taboo in opening this topic up for discussion, and his remarkable work of scholarship deserves the highest praise.

Rating:
Summary: E puor si muove
Review: Young ideas' are not new. Many psychologists and psychiatrists working with persons in extreme situations have arrived to the same point: PTSD is an ethnocultural invention of Euro American Psychiatry. The so-called "PTSD-symptoms" are frequent. The syndrome is a construct. Allan Young collects evidence in passionate but scientific way. This book is a must for all students of mental health science that want to give to their profession a wider scope than just what one can get from a cookbook of euroamerican diagnosis that blinds more than helps as DSM-IV. Life is much more than DSM-IV and this book contributes to seeing that in an excellent manner.