Unshackled Mind: A Doctor’s Story of Trauma, Liberation and Healing By Cathy Wield. The Book Guild Ltd. 2025. £9.95 (pb). 344 pp. ISBN 9781835741443
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Unshackled Mind, by Cathy Wield, has left its author 'free at last from the shackles of psychiatry, free from the shackles of evangelicalism and free from the shackles placed on a young child sent away to boarding school'.It is an unusual and compelling book, in that the first half retells a story previously told by the same author, of her experience of severe depression, hospitalisation, treatment with multiple drugs, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and, ultimately, psychosurgery.Life after Darkness: A Doctor's Journey through Severe Depression (CRC Press, 2005) was a book that made me question psychiatric treatments and hospitalisation, I think rightly so, and this new book raises other questions.There are threads that spiral through both books, and views about these will differ.Early trauma often coexists with mental
Source: BJPsych Bulletin
Author: Rebecca Lawrence
Institution: NHS Lothian
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4416094848
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