Cultures of Healing

Okay, I wrote this, so of course I like it--and since I have to give it "stars" in order to post, I give it five.But the point of this "review" is to say that the book will be back in print this Fall (2003), from Transaction Publishers/Rutgers, with a new intro and a new title--"Health and Suffering in America: The Context and Content of Mental Health Care."The hype about mental health care in the last five years or so has grown more and more outrageously false. I'm glad Transaction wants to keep this book in print, as a corrective to the nonsense that those who profit from mental health care would have you believe.

This is the best book on comparative clinical psychology/psychiatry I've ever read.If psychotherapists/psychiatrists were considered faith healers (which this book makes clear they are), this book would qualify as a book on comparative religion, and it would make one question their faith.Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism, Cognitive Therapy, and Biological Psychiatry are all analyzed, with their core beliefs and assumptions described in detail. Each school's standing with the scientific facts is mentioned.Cultural reasons why Americans accept certain therapies, or come to accept them in spite of their unscientific bases, are also given.The most noticable omission is the lack of any discussion of Albert Ellis' Rational Emotive Therapy, although many of the comments about Beck's therapy apply to RET too.The chapter on biological psychiatry could have provided more background on its history, as well as mention more specific psychiatrists' and pharmaceutical companies' influences. For biological psychiatry, "Blaming the Brain" by Elliot Valenstein (mentioned in this text's acknowledgements) is also recommended.Without coming out too strongly (which could create a backlash), the book does an excellent job of pointing out how biological psychiatry's illness model is used to justify prescribing psychoactive drugs with no proven specificity in treating "illnesses", in a culture which otherwise wages war on psychoactive drugs.The only noticable editorial error was a major misspelling of "renaissance".

I was amazed at the clarity this book sheds on psychological schools of thought. It does an excellent job of explicating the values of each school of thought, giving the reader information by which to evaluate them. I would highly recommend Cultures of Healing to anyone interested in therapy to help them understand what types of therapists do what, and what they believe in. I would also recommend Cultures of Healing to any psychology student who wishes to make some sense out of the morass of contradictory beliefs.Definitely buy this book.

This book changed my life. I took a class taught by Dr. Fancher my last semester of college, in which we studied this book and half a dozen others. As a psychology major, I wished I had taken this class first, rather than last, in my major. Most books on mental health either push a particular ideology or denounce psychotherapy completely. This is the only book I know that both reveals the exagerrated claims of various schools, and respectfully makes sense of what clinicians actually do. In class, and I believe in the book, it was clear that Dr. Fancher cares very deeply that people in pain get help. Equally important, he cares that they not be sold a bill of goods. After studying this book, I see psychotherapy as a way of trying to do the best we can with difficult lives, not a personal course in The Truth. This book empowers all of us to look at therapy as a source of ideas and support, not an authority.

I am a psychologist, and have been reading actively in the field of psychology since 1960. I have never encountered a book nearly as good as this one that deal with the same subject matter. If you are interested in psychopathology, psychotherapy, mental health and its care, there is no better book than this one. Fancher writes with great clarity, with a philosopher's analytic ability, but also with great heart, with wisdom and compassion. And much of what he has to say is very hard to find anywhere else. The book presents a perspective that is not well known to the general public, that cuts against the grain of much of our popular understanding. It is a very tightly argued book. His arguments, which require real effort and concentration to follow, are detailed, scientifically and philosophically sophisticated, informed with clinical experience and with real wisdom. My favorite chapter is "The Middlebrow Land of Cognitive Therapy." There are penetrating insights in this chapter that were entirely new to me, although I have taught this material in two different courses for years. I will never look at cogntive therapy the same way again. As far as I know most of the contents of this chapter are original insights of Fancher, and can be found nowhere else. My second favorite chapter is "Biological Psychiatry's Confusion of Tongues." For me there was little new in this chapter, but it is by far the best summary of the problems with biological psychiatry that I have ever read. The critical analysis he presents in this chapter is not only brilliantly done, it is also an analysis that is quite hard to find elsewhere, and of absolutely fundamental importance in understanding biological psychiatry. This is an extremely powerful book, and most of its major arguments are so sharply and compellingly developed that I think most open-minded readers will have to admit that Fancher is pretty much right in most of his major conclusions. Of all of the psychology books I have read in the last ten years or so, this is the one I would have been most proud to have written myself.