When pure cocaine was isolated from coca leaves and introduced to medical science in the 19th century, Freud thought he had found the cure for depression and for morphine/heroin addiction. However, many of the patients to whom Freud prescribed cocaine became addicted to it, and suffered severe adverse effects as a result. Freud eventually gave up on cocaine as a therapeutic drug, and went on to develop psychoanalysis.-- from "Drugs & Behavior, Week 5"'s online class notes (stumbled onto via Google)
About a year ago, I posted some material on the new field of "bibliotherapy," the employment of literature "as a therapeutic tool." At the time, I disliked the idea -- or, at least, its execution; according to the BBC, the titles most likely to be "prescribed" were those "that act as an inspiration to help the reader forget their troubles, or those that will cheer them up by making them laugh." But, in my opinion and experience, misery loves company, and that love can be the start of mental health. When depressed, I want identification, not distraction.
Less objectionable is a new scheme in the UK to prescribe self-help books to patients who might otherwise recieve little to no treatment. "By the summer," the Guardian reports, "there will be 80 self-help clinics in Devon, all using books based on cognitive behavioural therapy." While the books won't solve the problems of the UK's mental health system, quotes like these (excepting the last sentence, and its attitude towards therapy) prove encouraging:
'The best thing about these books are they are full of case studies that make you realise you are not alone,' [one woman] said. 'Depression means you feel extremely isolated. [The books] also remove the stigma as you can do it in the privacy of your home. For me, the antidepressants stopped working but the book did not and it meant I was making myself better instead of relying on someone else.'
If you didn't catch it, I sincerely recommend Alix Spiegel's profile of Robert Spitzer in last week's New Yorker.
Although the DSM was first published in 1952 and a second edition (DSM-II) came out in 1968, early versions of the document were largely ignored. Spitzer began work on the third version (DSM-III) in 1974, when the manual was a spiral-bound paperback of a hundred and fifty pages. It provided cursory descriptions of about a hundred mental disorders, and was sold primarily to large state mental institutions, for three dollars and fifty cents. Under Spitzer’s direction—which lasted through the DSM-III, published in 1980, and the DSM-IIIR (“R” for “revision”), published in 1987—both the girth of the DSM and its stature substantially increased. It is now nine hundred pages, defines close to three hundred mental illnesses, and sells hundreds of thousands of copies, at eighty-three dollars each. But a mere description of the physical evolution of the DSM doesn’t fully capture what Spitzer was able to accomplish. In the course of defining more than a hundred mental diseases, he not only revolutionized the practice of psychiatry but also gave people all over the United States a new language with which to interpret their daily experiences and tame the anarchy of their emotional lives.It's an article Foucault would have clipped and, no doubt, written about. Spitzer, the article implies, almost singelhandedly created the DSM we now treat so deferentially, and research has never verified the DSM's assertions.
“The DSM revolution in reliability is a revolution in rhetoric, not in reality,” Kutchins and Kirk write. Kirk told me, “No one really scrutinized the science very carefully.” This was owing, in part, to the manual’s imposing physical appearance. “One of the objections was that it appeared to be more authoritative than it was. The way it was laid out made it seem like a textbook, as if it was a depository of all known facts,” David Shaffer says. “The average reader would feel that it carried great authority and weight, which was not necessarily merited.”
"was good for the world at large. Good for psychiatry, good for patients. Good for everyone at that point in time to have someone whose view may have been more simpleminded than the world really is. A more complex view of life at that point would have resulted in a ho-hum ‘We have this book and maybe it will be useful in our field.’ The revolution came not just from the material itself, from the substance of it, but from the passion with which it was introduced."