Is madness purely a medical condition that can be treated with drugs? Is there really a clear dividing line between mental health and mental illness – or is it not so easy to classify who is sane and who is insane?

In Madness Explained leading clinical psychologist Richard Bentall shatters the modern myths that surround psychosis. This groundbreaking work argues that we cannot define madness as an illness to be cured like any other; that labels such as ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘manic depression’ are meaningless, based on nineteenth-century classifications; and that experiences such as delusions and hearing voices are in fact exaggerations of the mental foibles to which we are all vulnerable.
 
We need, Bentall argues, a radically new way of thinking about psychiatric problems – one that does not reduce madness to brain chemistry, but understands and accepts it as part of human nature.

‘A monumental study … brave, well-researched and accessible’ 
Scotland on Sunday

‘A radical new look at madness … Bentall’s approach gives all mental health professionals new reasons to listen to and talk to their patients’ 
Independent

‘Bentall demystifies psychosis and restores the patient to a proper place with the rest of humankind’ 
Aaron T. Beck

Press contact: Emma Williamson, 020 7010 3253, emma.williamson@penguin.co.uk

'A radical new look at madness - This is a book to seduce a new generation into psychiatry and psychology'- Independent

'A monumental study - brave, well-researched and accessible' Scotland on Sunday

Why are we no better at treating psychosis than the Victorians? Since the end of the 19th Century, there has been little or no improvement in the rate at which people recover from severe mental illness. What are we going to do about it?

We are used to the problems of the mental health services being attributed to a lack of resources but in his controversial new book Madness Explained Richard Bentall argues that the real problem is a poverty of ideas. If we are to make real progress in helping the most vulnerable members of our society we need to radically rethink our whole approach to madness.

Richard Bentall has pioneered research which aims to bring the psychiatric patient back into the mainstream of humanity by showing how madness can be understood in terms of normal psychological processes. Once described as ?someone who has done more than most to move the dividing line between sanity and madness?, in Madness Explained he combines his personal story with his years of scientific research, not merely to move the line, but to dissolve it completely.

Bentall explains why many of the fundamental assumptions about madness accepted by modern psychiatry are unscientific and misleading. He argues that:
-Psychiatric diagnoses are about as accurate as horoscopes.
-Hallucinations and paranoid delusions may well stem from environmental factors such as racial discrimination and are not, as is often supposed, a result of brain disease or faulty genetics.
-For some patients widely used psychiatric drugs are at best ineffective and at worst dangerous. This is supported Bentall?s own experience having taken an antipsychotic drug for research purposes with disastrous results.
- Most controversially, Bentall argues that many patients could lead happier, more productive lives if left alone by psychiatric services. Many patients need to be liberated rather than cured.

Richard Bentall gained his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University College of North Wales, Bangor before obtaining a qualification in clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool. In 1989 he received the British Psychological Society?s May Davidson Award for his contribution to the field of clinical psychology. He holds a Chair in Experimental Psychology at the University of Manchester.