Guilty as charged: A response to Anthony S. David

Abstract

Reading a review of one's own work can be a very unsettling experience. It is not just that the limitations of one's efforts are publicly highlighted. In this case it was also the discovery that the book that I thought I had written is not quite the same as the book that the reviewer appears to have read. Of course, this may be partly my fault. There is usually no opportunity to respond to these kinds of discrepancies, so I am very grateful to have the opportunity to reply to his comments. Much of Tony's critique concerns the style of my book, which he correctly notes is an attempt to summarise my work and the views that I have reached about madness after nearly two decades of research. It is indeed a bit of a monster at 512 pages of text and would have been more of a monster had it not been for the help and advice that I received from Stefan McGrath and his colleagues at Penguin. This length was necessitated by my efforts to justify, in as much detail as possible, a number of claims that I knew would be controversial, especially for my medical colleagues. Hence the nearly 100 pages of references, which I have tucked away at the back, where they are available to the psychologist or psychiatrist who wishes to examine the research in more detail, but where they, I hope, do not spoil the layperson's reading experience.