Psychiatry
Why are psychiatrists scared of sectioning dangerous patients?
The police initially treated last weekend’s stabbings on a train near Huntingdon as a possible terror attack, before confirming it…
The problem with psychiatrists? They’re all depressed
Edinburgh seems underpopulated this year. The whisky bars are half full and the throngs of tourists who usually crowd the…
The psychiatrist obsessed with ‘reprogramming’ minds
William Sargant’s controversial treatments of troubled young women in the 1960s included prolonged induced comas, ECT and, in extreme cases, lobotomies
There’s nothing shameful about hypochondria
Caroline Crampton describes the real agonies of people obsessed with their fragility, revealing that her own hypochondria stems from a childhood cancer diagnosis
A dangerous Christ-complex
His fateful intransigence over the negotiations has been variously ascribed to a Christ-complex, an unhappy childhood and even latent homosexuality
Bitter pills to swallow
What is it like to go mad? Not so much developing depression or having a panic attack — which is…
A burnt-out case
Those who best remember Dr Anthony Clare (1942-2007) for his broadcasting are firmly reminded by this biography that we didn’t…
Easy pills to swallow
Having a breakdown? Try this pill, or that — or these? Built on the 1950s myth of a chemical imbalance…
Exposed: Our dangerous dependency on antidepressants
We have become a nation of sad pill-poppers. The British, once Churchill’s ‘lion-hearted nation’, are now among the most depressed…
Why I now find listening to Beethoven nauseating
Stephen Bernard has led an institutionalised life. Behind the doors of the church presbytery, at public school, on hospital wards…
Broken and mad
In the final months of 1914, medical officers on the Western Front began seeing a new kind of casualty. Soldiers…
The death of the author
The ‘journey’ — at least the one played out in public — begins with an announcement that you are incurable.…
Time out of mind
There can hardly be two novelists less alike than Sebastian Faulks and Will Self, in style and in content. Faulks…
Shrunk
America’s psychoanalysts are becoming an endangered species
