What Psychobattery is About -- Savage Encounter -- Primal Scream -- The Mystery of Lithium -- The Biology of Mental Illness -- Facing Reality -- Treatment by Assault -- The Identity Crisis in Psychiatry -- Psychotherapy is Forever -- Treatment by Incarceration -- The Family is the Patient -- The Identified Patient -- Anorexia Nervosa -- Suicide -- Warning: May be Harmful or Fatal if Swallowed -- Erewhon Revisited, A Psychoparable.

It is an honour for me to be asked to contribute a foreword to the book of my friends Therese and Ralph Spitzer. I got to know them during an assignment as Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, and I have shared to the full the distress that comes to all those who have to watch people that they love affected by mental illness in one form or another. I have been an orientalist for only half my life; for the first half I was a biochemist, embryologist, and experimental morphologist. "When I, a young man, was called to the bar" (as Gilbert & Sullivan have it), in other words, when in the early twenties I was starting life as a research biochemist, I was greatly attracted to the biochemistry of mental disease. I followed the lectures for the Diploma in Psychological Medicine, and worked at the Fulbourn Mental Hospital near Cambridge on the creatinine metabolism in catatonic patients suffering from what we used to call in those days dementia praecox. I published one paper (with T. J. McCarthy), but my hopes soon faded, and when I read an excellent review on the subject which covered much literature, and ended by saying that biochemists had grown tired of "fishing in distilled water for the causes of mental disease," I realised that I had better find something more worthwhile. Eggs and embryos were the answer, and very worthwhile they were.

Accessibility summary: This PDF is not accessible. It is based on scanned pages and does not support features such as screen reader compatibility or descriptions for non-text content (e.g., images and graphs). However, it likely supports searchable and selectable text based on OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Users with accessibility needs may not be able to use this content effectively. Please contact us at through this accessibility request webform if you require assistance or an alternative format.

Inaccessible, or known limited accessibility

No reading system accessibility options actively disabled

Publisher contact for further accessibility information: accessibilitysupport@springernature.com

Licensed e-book