SYNOPSIS
In this article, psychiatrist and science journalist, Ben Goldacre's critique of the pharmaceutical industry, Bad Pharma, is reviewed and contextualised with other recent publications in this area. This review article focuses in particular on psychopharmaceutical medicine, and its relationship to psychiatric diagnosis, increasingly medicalised notions of mental suffering, and the cultural and economic forces that relate to its treatment. While Goldacre occupies a critical position towards the industry's powerful influence over these areas, his position also seems to rest on some modernist and objective scientific interpretations of mental health, which, it is argued, are incomplete tools for understanding human experience.
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Notes on contributors
Tom Cotton
Tom Cotton is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist and film-maker with a special interest in schizophrenia and the implications of modern and postmodern discourses for its treatment. His 2010 Wellcome Trust funded documentary, There is a Fault in Reality, explored first-person experiences of schizophrenia, which is also the subject of his current doctoral research. Tom studied Fine Art Film at Central St Martins, and gained an MSc in Psychotherapy and Counselling from Roehampton University in 2008. He managed a residential therapeutic community for psychosis between 2010 and 2012.