Book Review

摘要

Sarah Chaney’s is lucidly written, engagingly illustrated and refreshingly critical. It treads a fine line of critique, avoiding an unnecessarily confrontational approach (with mental health services), whilst making sure to point out the limitations of some psychiatric approaches to self-harm. Chaney’s critique is historical, as the title suggests. She argues with abundant justification that ‘Medical diagnoses – especially but not only in psychiatry – shift across time and culture …To assume that today’s ideas are “true” in a way that yesterday’s were not is to suggest that modern science is omniscient’ (p. 12).