Marvin Ross, medical writer/publisher, author of Anti-Psychiatry and the UN Assault on the Mentally Ill and blogger at Mind You Reflection on Mental Illness, Mental Health and Life wrote a short review of my new forthcoming book Fads, Fakes and Frauds: Exploding Myths in Culture, Science and Psychotherapy.
“In 2015, I had the pleasure of favourably reviewing Psychology Gone Wrong: The Dark Side of Science and Therapy by Tomasz Witkowski and Maciej Zatonski. Since then, I’ve been anxiously waiting for him to write more. His latest book, Fads, Fakes, and Frauds, has been worth the wait. Since 2015, the amount of disinformation has increased considerably and, thanks to the Internet, that disinformation is spreading faster than ever before.
We tend to take at face value much of what we are told by “experts” without ever looking at the evidence and governments buy-in and fund all manner of strategies that have considerable hype but little or no efficacy. Dr Witkowski’s highly readable account exposes the reality of much of what we take for granted. I was personally very intrigued by what he had to say about suicide prevention strategies and the proliferation and supposed efficacy of psychotherapy.
The skeptics among us like Dr Witkowski are valuable and this is a very valuable and important book. While it will interest many, it should be required reading by government officials who develop and fund mental health programs.”
Fads, Fakes and Frauds: Exploding Myths in Culture, Science and Psychotherapy will be released this year by BrownWalker, which has previously published two of my other books:
Psychology Gone Wrong 
Reblogged this on Mind You.
Every time we use the term “Mental Health” when we are talking about brain function disorders, we too are situated in the sphere of fakeness. Our minds are not thinking outside of the lexicon prison that psychotherapeutic ideas put us in. The term mental health is a metaphor…meaning, of course, that when we talk about someone having a mental health issue, we are not talking about medical conditions…we are talking about psychosocial issues that can affect any of us.
The term ‘mental illness’ needs to be done away with. Consider what that terminology means to the average person. When people talk about a homeless person being “mentally ill” they do not understand that what afflicts that person is a serious cerebral illness. The average person thinks that person has just collapsed emotionally and psychologically under the weight of life’s difficulties (which describes mental health, not brain health). Do most people know that hallucinations and delusions are neurological symptoms? The answer is no. We have got to grapple with how these artifacts of misguided ideas, like ‘psychotic break’, and ‘psychosis’, mental illness, dissociation, etc. are misinforming the law and public policies.
The commentaries on this blog are insightful and enlightened, except that they are seated within the lexicon that is causing so many of the problems that we advocates lament.
Thank you for this comment. I’m afraid you are right. Despite the fact that most of what I write about is discovering hidden meanings, I too often fall into the trap of imposed meanings.