Bentall - Doctoring the mind: why psychiatric treatments fail

As usual I must thank my numerous postgraduate students and colleagues in clinical psychology and psychiatry for stimulating my thinking about the issues discussed in the following chapters. Of my current and recent postgraduates, I would like to mention Eve Applegate, Hazel Dunn, Paul French, Becca Knowles, Sara Melo, Michael Moutoussis, Justin Thomas, Alisa Udachina and Filippo Verase. Of my colleagues I would like to mention, in clinical psychology, Tony Morrison, Mike Jackson, Steve Jones, John Read and Sara Tai, in biomedical statistics Graham Dunn, Chris Roberts, Paula Williamson and Gill Lancaster, and, in psychiatry, Shn Lewis, David Kingdon, David Linden, Richard Morriss, Jan Scott and Richard Drake (who, I guess, would disagree with much of what I have written but who seem to be relaxed about collaborating with someone who has one foot in the antipsychiatry camp). I would also like to thank my assistant Hanneke Booij for keeping me organized during my first extremely busy year at Bangor. A special mention should also be given to Pete Saunders of PCCS Books (a small publishing house specializing in books about psychotherapy) for alerting me to the contribution of Carl Rogers, which has almost been forgotten by most clinical psychologists. Self-evidently, none of these people should be held in any way responsible for any errors I have made. Perhaps one of the greatest joys of an academic life is that it allows one to work in friendly cooperation with talented people whose views on important issues are often completely different from ones own.

I would like to thank my wife Aisling, a clinical psychologist who works in an early intervention service, for her support and for endless discussions about service users, their problems and their aspirations. I would also like to thank my children Fintan and Keeva for putting up with my occasional grumpiness during the writing of this book. My sister and brother-in-law Deirdre and Steven OConnor are to be thanked for wining and dining me while I was welded to my laptop during visits to Mullingar. My good friend and collaborator Charles Fernyhough is to be thanked for coming up with the title of the book after a mere second of thought; I had been struggling with the problem for months. I would also like to thank the helpful and constructively critical team at Penguin Books, especially Helen Conford, who has the patience of several saints.

Finally, I must offer my thanks to the numerous service users who have taught me most of what I know about psychosis, and especially those who have consented to me including their (necessarily heavily disguised) stories in these pages. I suspect that the time we have spent together has often been of more benefit to me than to them.

Richard Bentall
November 2008