Bøger af Stanley Wilkin

Medicine functions outside of the law and has fashioned its own codes of conduct. Although an arm of government it also functions as a state within a state in which doctors act as little more than commissars. If a patient does not do as the doctor demands, he or she can suffer punishments such as the withdrawal of treatments. In psychiatry, the doctor has absolute control of patients and can perform invasive brain therapies on very young children, employ memory-destroying ECT on the basis of subjective judgement and medical authority. In this specialisation, as a patient you lose many of your democratic rights on the word of a doctor.

A short book of horror. All the usual culprits are here (ghouls and vampires) but presented different. Just as nasty if not more so. Stories and poems to frighten and occasionally amaze and amuse.

This book covers prehistoric Arabia until the emergence of Islam, noting how far into the past Arabic culture goes, the existence of Islamic behavioural codes in pre-Islamic Arabia, the extent of Arab migration from c500 BCE reaching into Palestine, Syria and Egypt. It considers, albeit briefly, the effects of African and Syrian Christianity on Islam, Islam as a Monist Christian cult similar to the Donatists and Circumcellians of Tunisia and Mani's extensive replication of Christianity. It demonstrates how Islam modelled itself on the empires of Himyar, Rome and Sasanian Persia, assuming that territorial expansion and religious expansion went hand in hand.

Part Two of the History of Islam continues the investigation as far as the Constitution of Mecca, on the way considering the origins of the religion and its early developments. This is not the traditional narrative, but one which looks at all possibilities, which analyses all claims, and accepts no accepted truths.

A look at modern and 19th century psychiatry: the truth of the monoamine hypothesis, personality disorder, the descriptions in the DSM, its scientific status and legitimacy. Is it a real science or the self-fulfilling claims of an elite? Is there any evidence of cures or does psychiatry make people feel worse? This book distinguishes between Asylum Psychiatry and Dynamic Psychiatry, with the former, a busy advocate of ECT and drug therapies dominant. The book will consider the coercive behaviour of psychiatry and its policing role for the state.

Medicine occupies the position of a state within a state and claims rights over patients. It runs itself outside the laws of liberal democracies. Psychiatry has roots in eugenics and Nazi rule in Germany. Psychiatrists originated the first racist organisations in Germany, and the holocaust emerged from psychiatry with hundred of thousands of mental health patients killed from 1933 onward. This book challenges the rights accorded to medicine and suggests that no liberal political system can tolerate, or should, powerful groups that operate as states within a state. The elite rights given to medical practitioners are neither realistic nor necessary.