Psychology Reading

Crann na Beatha

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Valmont

+1 to Opening Skinners Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The Twentieth Century; this is the book that made me want to study psychology. There are so many crappy psychology books on the shelves that I usually go by recommendations. My favourites in no particular order are:

The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz. Here Szasz compares the concepts of mental and physical illness arguing that it isn't useful or scientific to speak of the mind being metaphorically ill. I learned from this that it is very important to consider the implications of how we frame psychological problems linguistically.

Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature by Richard Bentall. Bentall shows that the the class of phenomena we call 'schizophrenia' are so varied and all-encompassing as to be almost meaningless. He also does a good job of normalising the behaviours we associate with 'mad' people.

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch. This is the definitive refutation of the popular theories stating that depression is caused by pathological levels of monoamines. Kirsch walks us through his own ground-breaking meta-analytic studies and the key evidence backing up the monoamine hypothesis to show us that there is no empirical foundation to the theory whatsoever. I recommend this book to people more than any other.

Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry by Thomas Szasz. A detailed and exhaustive history of psychiatry which I think is very relevant to psychologists if only to show how important it is to distance the practice of psychology from psychiatry as much as possible. This history will also give you a lot to think about in terms of the morality of the various treatments available to mental health practitioners.

Crann na Beatha

This post has been deleted.

Valmont

I think in this forum stickying a thread is the only way to guarantee people won't read it!

susmac

Just looked up the Opening Skinners Box on amazon, lots of reviews saying that the author has fabricated a lot of the content!!??

Valmont

There was a claim that one or two of Slater's anecdotes about the people she interview weren't true but the content concerning the historical figures in psychology and the work they did is fantastically presented. An average of 31 reviews on amazon gives it a rating of 4.3 out of 5. It's not a peer-reviewed paper but it was the book that made me choose to study psychology after I left school.