Doctoring the Mind: Why psychiatric treatments fail is a 2009 book by Richard Bentall, his thesis is critical of contemporary Western psychiatry.

Bentall, a professor of clinical psychology, argues that recent scientific research shows that the medical approach to mental illness is fatally flawed.

[1] According to Bentall, it seems there is no "evidence that psychiatry has made a positive impact on human welfare"[2] and "patients are doing no better today than they did a hundred years ago".

A review by Paul Broks in The Sunday Times summarized its position as: "Like Szasz, Bentall is firmly opposed to the biomedical model, but he also takes issue with extreme social relativists who would deny the reality of madness."

[8] In the preface, Bentall writes that "conventional psychiatry might reasonably be criticized, not on hard-to-define humanistic grounds (although these are important) but because it has been profoundly unscientific and at the same time unsuccessful at helping some of the most distressed and vulnerable people in our society".

[10] As an alternative to neo-Kraepelinian classification systems such as DSM and ICD-10 Chapter V employing these diagnostic labels, Bentall proposes to focus on symptoms ("complaints"), such as paranoia or auditory hallucinations.

[16] The author discerns that antipsychotics (psychotropic drugs used primarily in the treatment of psychotic disorders) can be effective, but are frequently misused, despite their heavy side-effects.

[25] Bentall claims that "coercion [of patients] has been become so universally accepted amongst mental health professionals that many no longer see it as ethically troubling".

[46] Born in Sheffield, Bentall attended the University College of North Wales, Bangor as an undergraduate before registering for a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at the same institution.