Humanizing Psychiatrists: Toward a Humane Psychiatry : an Application of the Philosophy of Science to Psychiatry

Niall McLaren

sept 2010 · Loving Healing Press

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The long-awaited final installment of the Biocognitive Model Series
"Humanizing Psychiatists" is the third of a series directed at developing the Biocognitive Model of Psychiatry as the replacement for the three nineteenth century models of mental disorder, psychoanalysis, behaviorism and biological psychiatry. In this volume, the author continues to explore the logical status of theories used in psychiatry. He shows that Dennett's functionalism and Searle's biological naturalism cannot be used as the basis for a theory for biological psychiatry. He argues that phenomenology is a valuable technique but can never form a genuine theory. in addition, he shows how orthodox psychiatry uses its publishing industry to suppress criticism of itself, which is a gross breach of scientific ethics. He then shows how his Biocognitive Model of Mind can be applied to clinical practice with dramatic results.
Praise for Niall McLaren's Biocognitive Model of Mind
"This book is a tour de force. It demonstrates a tremendous amount of erudition, intelligence and application in the writer. It advances an interesting and plausible mechanism for many forms of human distress. It is an important work that deserves to take its place among the classics in books about psychiatry."
--Robert Rich, PhD, AnxietyAndDepression-Help.com
"Dr. McLaren brilliantly wields the sword of philosophy to refute the modern theories of psychiatry with an analysis that is sharp and deadly. His own proposed novel theory could be the dawn of a new revolution in the medicine of mental illness."
--Andrew R. Kaufman, MD Chief Resident of Emergency Psychiatry Duke University Medical Center
About the Author
Niall McLaren, M.D. is a psychiatrist practicing in Darwin, in the far north of Australia. He has long had an interest in the philosophical and logical status of theories used in psychiatry.His work is radical in the extreme but he sees no option if psychiatry is to move beyond its present status as an ideology and finally into the realm of the sciences.
For more information please visit www.NiallMcLaren.com

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Niall (Jock) McLaren is an Australian psychiatrist with long experience in remote area psychiatry in the far north of the country. He graduated in psychiatry in Western Australia in 1977 and, while working in the state prison psychiatric service, began training in philosophy. He was interested in finding the correct theoretical basis for a "scientific" theory for psychotherapy. This has led him to the conclusion that modern psychiatry fails as science because it has no agreed model of mental disorder. To fill the theoretical gap, he has developed a dualist model of mind, based in the the work of the mathematicians Alan Turing and Claude Shannon. This work, now known as the biocognitive theory of mind, produced a general theory of mind for psychiatry. It generates a formal model of mental disorder as a primary psychological disturbance in a healthy brain, and predicts that mental disorder is not due to "chemical imbalances of the brain." It challenges orthodox psychiatry on many points but is emphatically not a new sort of "antipsychiatry" Learn more about Niall McLaren, M.D. at www.FuturePsychiatry.com