Welcome to the Loony Bin: 55 Years in Psychiatry and the Law

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Could I start again I would still choose psychiatry. Even the many failings I have encountered would not deter me. They do not detract from the key reward of its practice, caring communion with other minds. Psychiatry has no other choice. It wrestles with the most complex puzzles of life. How does the human mind work? How does existence begin to know itself?

Welcome to the Loony Bin charts fashions in psychiatry and the law over 55 years. The case histories illustrate miraculous cures as well as blundering repetition of harmful excesses. In contrast to vaunted claims of success, the actual impotence of psychiatry will persist until it tackles the difficult task of finding cause. The law has made more progress developing the logic of finding cause, but it still fails to protect the vulnerable innocent from false conviction.

I use the lessons of history to explore how we think and what makes us act. Deranged genes distort ideas to produce the psychoses of individuals, but normal genes produce the mass insanity of groups. What makes the difference? Individual psychosis emerges from the cauldron of disastrous personal experience, but the beliefs that sway the masses emerge from the cauldron of the group mind. Think not just of war, massacres, and how we persist in polluting our nest. Ponder on Hume’s law. Muse about the juristic sophistry of demeanour and hindsight and how they mislead you too. Discover the massive burden pseudo-illness imposes on advanced societies. Discern the operation of the group mind, the values cycle, and at its apex the benefit and menace of meme tyranny, that is, our submission to the ideas, right or wrong, that the group adopts.