David Bell
Dr. David S. Bell, neuropsychiatrist, trained in Sydney Australia from 1955 and in London in 1961-2 before running the Psychiatric Research Unit, which combined neurosurgery and neurology with the mental health disciplines. He took a special interest in epilepsy and drug addiction. Moving into private practice in 1970, he turned his interest in neuropsychiatry to the forensic assessment of head injury. Along the way he developed a therapeutic community and spent a great deal of time in group therapy. In a sense he was the creature of his times, described in his autobiography.
The simplest view of mental disorder divides it in three: “mad, sad or bad”. The mad have psychoses that disable. Fortunately, only a few go mad. Many more suffer. Here belong the depressed, the anxious and the obsessive, in most...
A mountain of anomalies and a canyon of pitfalls have not dissuaded psychiatrists from taking the descriptive approach to diagnosis. Â They simply ignore them. Others see promise of advance in more of the same approach. They propose dimensional measures of...
As dubious benefits, undesirable effects and high costs dampen the enthusiasm for psychotropic drugs, psychiatrists return to psychotherapy, discovering anew the power of the mind to deal with its own disorders. Altered attitudes can redirect seemingly intractable thought. In the...
In 1954 the first antipsychotic drug, chlorpromazine, appeared. It calmed the acutely disturbed psychotic patient remarkably well. In the decade that followed chemists produced variations, which did much the same, but all had side-effects. They induce a dullness of mind...
The natural concern of doctors for those who suffer has its downside. When they cannot distinguish fake from fact or self-defeating from resolvable conduct, empathy governs their reason. Objective criteria should guide diagnosis. Doctors (and judges for that matter) distinguish...
We feel the masters of our thoughts. We have no awareness of the automatic processing that makes perception meaningful and thought possible. Nor does self-awareness bring home how much our ideas come from others. We use the knowledge and skills...
To become effective, psychiatry has to give away descriptive diagnosis (see Elephantanopia series). It has to find causes. Far easier said than done. The causes of mental disorder are more elusive than those of physical illness. The March 2012 issue...
Ten years ago Robert Whitaker lambasted psychiatry in a best seller of the year, “Mad in America”. He reviewed a history of chaining lunatics, lobotomies, sterilisation and the Nazi solution of eugenics. He brought the sorry tale to its culmination in the...
I put aside for the time being major horrors such as Nazi Germany or English soccer crowds on the rampage to begin with a minor example of errant group mind. In my home town in November 2012 the local newspaper...