Brainaction

I learned psychiatry in a mental hospital, which had its spectacular moments of irrational chaos, but the loony bin I analyse in my book, “Welcome”, is this world that contains us all. As a psychiatrist I had no difficulty recognising the insanity...

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...

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...

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...