Mark Brown in the Guardian

Great interview! I have read the magazine and greatly admire the work that has gone into it. Anything that helps reduce stigma and difficulties for people with mental health issues is commendable. I am involved in a kind of 'recruitment' policy for a large organisation and I have always strongly rejected suggestions of screening out people with certain mental health difficulties. That said, I am just about to embark on a dissertation focussing on psychiatric medicine and I still believe our attitude is not helpful. This is partly due to the medicalisation of life and the sanctification of medicine in a post-religious age. The psychiatrists and therapists are the new priests of a secular age and people are encouraged to hand over their autonomy to these people far too readily. I do believe in the good that some of them do (I am especially a fan of CBT) but there are problems partly due to a misunderstanding of what mental illness actually is. Sometimes it has a physical cause (an obvious neuropathology) but in other cases it clearly does not. There is, in these cases, an assumption that there is a physical cause so subtle it is yet undetected, a notion I strongly reject. I still believe we overlook the phenomena and value of internal struggle, the non-medical 'difficulties in living' and we neglect man's spiritual dimension to our detriment. Sorry for my 'customary rant' (as described by one of my fellow students) and big congratulations to Mark for a great article and a quality magazine. jude

Really interesting article. Mark was a great editor here and will, I am sure, be a fantastic editor of One in Four.