The Future of Mental Health

The Future of Mental Health drills to the heart of the current mental health crisis, where hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide receive unwarranted “mental disorder diagnoses." It paints a picture of how mental health providers can improve their practices to better serve individuals in distress and outlines necessary steps for a mental health revolution. Eric Maisel’s goal is to inject more human interaction into the therapeutic process.

Maisel powerfully deconstructs the “mental disorder" paradigm that is the foundation of current mental health practices. The author presents a revolutionary alternative, a “human experience"paradigm. He sheds a bright light on the differences between so-called “psychiatric medication"and mere chemicals with powerful effects, explains why the DSM-5 is silent on causes, silent on treatment, and wedded to illegitimate “symptom pictures." Maisel describes powerful helping alternatives like communities of care, and explains why one day “human experience specialists" may replace current mental health professionals.

An important book for both service providers and service users, The Future of Mental Health brilliantly unmasks current mental health practices and goes an important step further: it describes what we are obliged to do in order to secure better mental health services—and better mental health—for everyone.

“Eric Maisel's book is extraordinary. Profoundly innovative and revolutionary, it describes the Herculean but not impossible tasks facing the mental health establishment and reshuffles all the cards in psychiatry.”

—Patrick Landman, Psychiatrist, Child Psychiatrist, Chairman, STOP DSM France

“Dr. Maisel’s bold new book The Future of Mental Health is a refreshing seed in what otherwise might be considered a forlorn mental health landscape. Maisel not only paints a picture of what a new mental health countryside could look like but he also provides useful suggestions of how we might get there and why it might be important that we start heading in that direction today.”

—Tim Carey, Head of Research, Centre for Remote Health, Central Australian Health Service; Chair, Regional, Rural, and Remote Advisory Group, Australian Psychological Society

“Maisel really throws the gauntlet down with this one, and the psychiatric community will find it difficult to ignore his challenge.”

—Mark D. White, Ph.D., Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, blogger at Psychology Today, and author of The Illusion of Well-Being