Joel Tatelman

Bentall's "Doctoring the Mind" is one of a suite of publications that should be required reading for anyone training in, or practising, psychiatry or psychotherapy. Ditto for anyone receiving treatment of any kind for mental or emotional distress of any kind. However, most psychiatrists will remain ignorant of it because, like religious fundamentalists, their unquestioning, anti-scientific commitment to their belief-system, rigorously inculcated in their training, renders them irrationally hostile to actual evidence-based research and thinking on these issues. Bentall shows us the beginnings of what a truly scientific approach to understanding and treating mental illness would look like. Modern psychiatry has proven itself more allied to the mediaeval conception of the humours than to true, evidence-based investigation and Bentall shows, in rigorous, documented detail how and why.