"This book is a detailed IE account of the strangle-hold psychiatry has on so many. ... this text should be core reading for anyone in the helping professions who is unaware of or has forgotten how psychiatry controls and manipulates those under its authority. ... this is an important book. It made us question a good deal of what we 'know'; personally and professionally, and we have already recommended it to colleagues, friends, and students." (Jennifer Poole, Zachary Sera Grant & Katherina Yerro, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, Vol. 5, 2016)
"This book is arguably the most comprehensive and brilliant critique of psychiatry that I've ever read; it's a devastating expose of psychiatry's discredited medical model and
institutional psychiatry, 'a regime of ruling.' Bonnie Burstow's book is absolutely awesome in its numerous, thoroughly researched facts and original insights and scholarship frequently voiced with passion." (Don Weitz, Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. 17 (1), 2015)
"This is a powerfully unsettling book. Burstow expresses outrage about, and level-headed analysis of, the oppressive and alienating practices of psychiatry and holds out hope for emancipation that builds on everyday interactions in a transformed society. It's an outstanding contribution to critical thinking about mental health, and to ethics, law, and social change a no-holds barred, take-no-prisoners radical history and deconstruction of all modern mental health practices and an ambitious, inspiring 'eutopian' proposal for their reinvention." - David Cohen, Professor and Marjorie Crump Chair in Social Welfare, University of California, Los Angeles, US
