Books by members of the UK Critical Psychiatry Network
A selection of recent and classic publications by CPN members and close colleagues
Toxic Interactions and the Social Geography of Psychosis: Reflections on the Epidemiology of Mental Disorder
Hugh Middleton
Routledge, 2024
Toxic Interactions is a review of quantitative research that reveals ways in which urban living, trauma, ethnicity, stress and family background influence the risk of troubling psychotic experiences. These are robust findings that are difficult to explain conventionally, in anything other than very general terms. Drawing on theoretical approaches to knowledge, Toxic Interactions offers a novel explanation much more in keeping with critical approaches to psychiatry. A related blog can be found here.
Publisher →
Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress and Neurodiversity
Fern Press, 2025
A welcome antidote to the dangerous cult of overdiagnosis and the commodification of normal distress
Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth
Flint, 2025
Authoritative and well-researched documents the overinflation of antidepressant efficacy where the false scientific information repeated is altogether misleading. The scale of deception and fraud unearthed is staggering and incendiary
The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines: Antidepressants, Benzodiazepines, Gabapentinoids and Z-drugs
Wiley Blackwell, 2024
Psychiatrists are bombarded with information on how to start and continue medications for their patients. However, they receive little or no information on how and when to decrease or stop medications. These guidelines fill that gap
Insane Medicine: How the Mental Health Industry Creates Damaging Treatment Traps and How You Can Escape Them
Independently published, 2021
A huge blast of truth-telling fresh air that is so desperately needed in the fight to counteract ubiquitous pathologising pseudoscience
Earlier publications
A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs
(Revised Second Edition)
Joanna Moncrieff – PCCS Books, 2020
Challenges the claims for their mythical powers. Drawing on extensive research, she demonstrates that psychiatric drugs do not treat or cure mental illness by acting on hypothesised chemical imbalances
Critical Psychiatry: Controversies and Clinical Implications
Editor: Sandra Steingard – Springer, 2019
A guide for psychiatrists struggling to incorporate transformational strategies into their clinical work by incorporating and appreciating the more critical aspects of the field as a whole to drive the practice forward
Guidance for Psychological Therapists
Enabling conversations with clients taking or withdrawing from prescribed psychiatric drugs
A. Guy, J. Davies, R. Rizq (eds) – APPG Prescribed Drug Dependence, 2019
Supports therapists in deepening their knowledge and reflection on working with clients who are taking or withdrawing from prescribed psychiatric drugs
Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health
Editor: Bruce M.Z. Cohen – Routledge, 2018
Offers the most comprehensive collection of theoretical and applied writings to date with which students, scholars, researchers and practitioners within the social and health sciences can systematically problematise the practices, priorities and knowledge base of the Western system of mental health
Mental Health Uncertainty and Inevitability
Hugh Middleton & Melanie Jordan – Springer, 2017
Draws upon innovative research findings to rejuvenate the relationship between psychiatry and social science. It frames this by reference to certain inevitable and uncertain elements of mental health which characterise this field
The Theory and Practice of Democratic Therapeutic Community Treatment
Editors: Steve Pearce & Rex Haigh – Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017
Explains how to set up and run modern therapeutic communities as effective evidence-based interventions for personality disorder and other common mental health conditions
Psychiatry Reconsidered: From Medical Treatment to Supportive Understanding
Hugh Middleton – Palgrave Macmillan, 2015
Provides an account of mental health difficulties and how they are generally addressed in conventional medical circles, alongside critical reviews of the assumptions underpinning them to encourage more humanitarian perspectives
De-Medicalizing Misery II: Society, Politics and the Mental Health Industry
Editors: E. Speed, J. Moncrieff, M. Rapley – Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
Extends the critical scope of the previous volume into a wider social and political context, developing the critique of the psychiatrization of Western society and poses possible alternative solutions to the continuing issues of emotional distress
Mental Health Worldwide: Culture, Globalization and Development
Suman Fernando – Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
Offers a perceptive critique of the universalized model of psychiatry and its apparent exportation from the West to the developing world. Rooted in detailed analysis of the problems this causes, the book proposes new suggestions for advancing the field of mental health and wellbeing in a way that is ethical, sustainable and culturally sensitive
Psychiatry in Context: Experience, Meaning & Communities
Philip Thomas – PCCS Books, 2014
After careful examination of the problems of psychiatric diagnosis, treatments, scientific models of madness, and neuroscience, Thomas goes on to demonstrate how contextual factors are central to mental distress
The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs
Joanna Moncrieff – Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
A challenging reappraisal of the history of antipsychotics, revealing how they were transformed from neurological poisons into magical cures, their benefits exaggerated and their toxic effects minimized or ignored
A Straight Talking Introduction to Children’s Mental Health Problems
(Revised Second Edition)
Sami Timimi – PCCS Books, 2013
Rates of diagnosis of psychiatric disorders in children, such as depression, ADHD and autistic spectrum disorders, have shot up in recent years. So too has the prescription of antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs and stimulants. Yet the diagnoses are based on weak science, questionable research and powerful financial incentives
The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein on Language as Bewitchment and Clarity
John M. Heaton – Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
Taking Freud at his word and sharing his view of the importance of the talking cure, this book demonstrates how the language of Freud and his followers is often so confused as to be therapeutically useless. Drawing primarily on the work of Wittgenstein, John Heaton offers a radically different understanding of the talking cure which engages with the problem of language itself, and its capacity to bewitch both patient and therapist
Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families
Peter R. Breggin – Springer, 2013
This is the first book to establish guidelines and to assist prescribers and therapists in withdrawing their patients from psychiatric drugs, including those patients with long-term exposure to antipsychotic drugs, benzodiazepines, stimulants, antidepressants, and mood stabilizers
De-Medicalizing Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition
Editors: M. Rapley, J. Moncrieff, J. Dillon – Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
Psychiatry and psychology have constructed a mental health system that does no justice to the problems it claims to understand and creates multiple problems for its users. Yet the myth of biologically-based mental illness defines our present. The book rethinks madness and distress reclaiming them as human, not medical, experiences
Not Crazy: You May Not Be Mentally Ill
Charles L. Whitfield – Muse House Press, 2011
Psychiatry today is not as advertised, as bestselling author Charles Whitfield describes in this scientifically accurate new book. It exposes the pseudo science behind modern biological psychiatry that misdiagnoses people who have painful emotional, psychological and behavioral symptoms as being mentally ill and then mistreats them with toxic psychiatric drugs that don’t work well or make them worse
The Myth of Autism: Medicalising Men’s and Boys’ Social and Emotional Competence
Sami Timimi, Neil Gardiner, Brian McCabe – Macmillan International, 2010
In this groundbreaking book, the authors dispute the concept of autism and explore the cultural and political reasons why the number of those diagnosed with it has increased over the years
The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment
(Revised Edition)
Joanna Moncrieff – Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
This book overturns the idea that psychiatric drugs work by correcting chemical imbalance and analyzes the professional, commercial and political vested interests that have shaped this view
Rethinking ADHD: From Brain to Culture
Editors: Sami Timimi & Jonathan Leo – Macmillan International, 2009
This book brings together, for the first time, a selection of international critiques on the role of ADHD in our society today, looking at how diagnoses have increased in recent years and the reasons behind this
Liberatory Psychiatry: Philosophy, Politics and Mental Health
Carl I. Cohen & Sami Timimi – Cambridge University Press, 2008
Psychiatry can help free persons from social, physical and psychological oppression, and it can assist persons to lead free self-directed lives. And, because social realities impact on mental well-being, psychiatry has a critical role to play in social struggles that further liberation
Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry
Peter R. Breggin – Springer, 2008
Presents startling scientific research on the dangerous behavioral abnormalities and brain dysfunctions produced by the most widely used and newest psychiatric drugs such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Effexor, Xanax, Ativan, Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta, Strattera, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Geodon, Abilify, lithium and Depakote
Humanising Psychiatry and Mental Health Care: The Challenge of the Person-Centred Approach
Rachel Freeth – Radcliffe Publishing, 2007
Explores, in depth, the link between modern psychiatric practice and the person-centred approach. It promotes an open dialogue between traditional rivals – counsellors and psychiatrists within the NHS – to assist greater understanding and improve practice
Critical Psychiatry: The Limits of Madness
Editor: Duncan Double – Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
Psychiatry is increasingly dominated by the reductionist claim that mental illness is caused by neurobiological abnormalities. Critical psychiatry disagrees with this and proposes a more ethical foundation for practice
Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity: Studies of Verbal Hallucinations
Ivan Leudar & Philip Thomas – Taylor & Francis, 2006
Records of people experiencing verbal hallucinations or hearing voices can be found throughout history. Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity examines almost 2,800 years of these reports including Socrates, Schreber and Pierre Janet’s Marcelle, to provide a clear understanding of the experience and how it may have changed over the millenia
Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World
Patrick Bracken & Philip Thomas – Oxford University Press, 2005
Involves an attempt to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions of mental health work, showing how recent developments in philosophy and ethics can help us to clarify some of the dilemmas and conflicts around different understandings of madness
The Dialectics of Schizophrenia
Philip Thomas – Free Associations Books, 1997
Summarizes the various approaches and points up their weaknesses and strengths. Refreshingly, author Philip Thomas does not join one or other of the various camps but shows how each perspective is actually necessary if we are to advance to a better understanding of what schizophrenia is
