Alvin Pam is an American psychologist and author who was formerly the director of psychiatry at the Bronx Psychiatric Center in the Bronx, New York City, New York. He also formerly served as a clinical professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. [1] [2] With Colin A. Ross, he was the co-author and co-editor of the 1995 book Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry: Blaming the body, which harshly criticizes the field of biological psychiatry and its assumptions. [3] While working at the Bronx Psychiatric Center, Pam read Jay Neugeboren's book Imagining Robert, which convinced him to try to treat Neugeboren's brother Robert, about whom the book was written. Pam disagreed with the consensus of the center's staff that Robert could never live on his own. Shortly after Robert arrived at the Bronx Psychiatric Center in 1998, Pam told Jay that, shortly after starting to take atypical antipsychotic medications, his brother was suddenly ready to be released. Jay later credited Pam, among others, with allowing Robert to live without a psychiatric recurrence for over six years, "the longest stretch in his adult life." [4] [5]
Anti-psychiatry is a movement based on the view that psychiatric treatment is often more damaging than helpful to patients, highlighting controversies about psychiatry. Objections include the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis, the questionable effectiveness and harm associated with psychiatric medications, the failure of psychiatry to demonstrate any disease treatment mechanism for psychiatric medication effects, and legal concerns about equal human rights and civil freedom being nullified by the presence of diagnosis. Historically critiques of psychiatry came to light after focus on the extreme harms associated with electroconvulsive treatment or insulin shock therapy. The term "anti-psychiatry" is in dispute and often used to dismiss all critics of psychiatry, many of who agree that a specialized role of helper for people in emotional distress may at times be appropriate, and allow for individual choice around treatment decisions.
Thomas Stephen Szasz was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism. His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and The Manufacture of Madness (1970) set out some of the arguments most associated with him.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the largest psychiatric organization in the world. It has more than 37,000 members who are involved in psychiatric practice, research, and academia representing a diverse population of patients in more than 100 countries. The association publishes various journals and pamphlets, as well as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM codifies psychiatric conditions and is used mostly in the United States as a guide for diagnosing mental disorders.
Peter Roger Breggin is an American psychiatrist and critic of shock treatment and psychiatric medication and Covid-19 response. In his books, he advocates replacing psychiatry's use of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy with psychotherapy, education, empathy, love, and broader human services.
Arthur Michael Kleinman is an American psychiatrist, psychiatric anthropologist and a professor of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry at Harvard University. He is well known for his work on mental illness in Chinese culture.
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill is a 2002 book by medical journalist Robert Whitaker, in which the author examines and questions the efficacy, safety, and ethics of past and present psychiatric interventions for severe mental illnesses, particularly antipsychotics. The book is organized as a historical timeline of treatment development in the United States.
Nancy Coover Andreasen is an American neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist. She currently holds the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa.
The biopsychiatry controversy is a dispute over which viewpoint should predominate and form a basis of psychiatric theory and practice. The debate is a criticism of a claimed strict biological view of psychiatric thinking. Its critics include disparate groups such as the antipsychiatry movement and some academics.
Biological Psychiatry is a biweekly, peer-reviewed, scientific journal of psychiatric neuroscience and therapeutics, published by Elsevier since 1985 on behalf of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, of which it is the official journal. The journal covers a broad range of topics related to the pathophysiology and treatment of major neuropsychiatric disorders. A yearly supplement is published which contains the abstracts from the annual meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry.
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorders. These include various maladaptations related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions. See glossary of psychiatry.
Jeffrey Alan Lieberman is an American psychiatrist who specializes in schizophrenia and related psychoses and their associated neuroscience (biology) and pharmacological treatment. He was principal investigator for CATIE, the largest and longest independent study ever funded by the United States National Institute of Mental Health to examine existing pharmacotherapies for schizophrenia. He was president of the American Psychiatric Association from May 2013 to May 2014.
Joseph Wortis was an American psychiatrist, longtime editor of the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry, and a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Allen J. Frances is an American psychiatrist. He is currently Professor and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He is best known for serving as chair of the American Psychiatric Association task force overseeing the development and revision of the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Frances is the founding editor of two well-known psychiatric journals: the Journal of Personality Disorders and the Journal of Psychiatric Practice.
Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist, author, researcher and educator based in Boston, United States. Since the 1970s his research has been in the area of post-traumatic stress. He is the author of The New York Times best seller, The Body Keeps the Score. Van der Kolk formerly served as president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and is a former co-director of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. He is a professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and president of the Trauma Research Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Colin A. Ross is a Canadian psychiatrist and former president of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation from 1993 to 1994. There is controversy about his methods and claims, which include recovering memories through hypnosis of Satanic ritual abuse and his own assertion that he can harness chi energy from his eyes to manipulate electronics.
Laurence Tancredi is a psychiatrist/lawyer, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. He was formerly the Kraft Eidman Professor of Medicine and the Law at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the Yale Law School, and psychiatric fellowship at Yale Medical School, Tancredi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and several books on topics of law, ethics and psychiatry, including Dangerous Diagnostics: The Social Power of Biological Information and When Law and Medicine Meet: A Cultural View. His most recent book is Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality.
Jay Neugeboren is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
Myrna Milgram Weissman is Diane Goldman Kemper Family Professor of Epidemiology in Psychiatry at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and Chief of the Division of Translational Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She is an epidemiologist known for her research on the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and psychiatric epidemiology, as it pertains to rates and risks of anxiety and mood disorders across generations. Among her many influential works are longitudinal studies of the impact of parental depression on their children.
Edward Ross Ritvo was an American psychiatrist known for his research on genetic components of autism. He was a professor emeritus of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute.