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Previous Volume 345:300 July 26, 2001 Number 4 Next

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By J. Allan Hobson and Jonathan A. Leonard. 292 pp., illustrated. Cambridge, Mass., Perseus, 2001. $26. ISBN 0-7382-0251-7.

In Out of Its Mind: Psychiatry in Crisis, Hobson, a psychiatrist and neurophysiologist, and Leonard, a freelance science writer, have created the equivalent of a medieval triptych depicting hell, purgatory, and heaven. As in all such paintings, hell is the most interesting.

Hobson and Leonard's hell is the present state of psychiatry. The authors describe the fate of patients with severe psychiatric disorders who were "unceremoniously decanted out of America's mental hospitals," how laws governing involuntary hospitalization have become "more deranged than the behavior" of those requiring treatment, and the swing of psychiatry's pendulum "from the brainless mind of Freud . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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