(5 / 5)
Fear or apprehension is deeply related to our survival, individually and as a species. In the realm of mental health, fear manifests as anxiety, a powerful force that can derail one’s peace and even existence if let unchecked. In Anxiety: The Inside Story (Loving Healing Press, 2018) Australian psychiatrist and author Niall McLaren educates readers on the most important facts about anxiety, including those that mainstream psychiatry will not tell us.
Dr. McLaren’s book takes on anxiety as the core cause of mental illness often misdiagnosed by psychiatrists around the world as various psychological disorders according to their shifting criteria of diagnosis. Explaining the concept and nature of anxiety, he includes case studies from personal experience as a practicing psychiatrist to illustrate how debilitating and even life-threatening chronic anxiety can become when left unaddressed or misdiagnosed as something else by psychiatrists.
Anxiety: The Inside Story is both a work of scientific exploration of the problem of anxiety in mental health as well as criticism of contemporary psychiatry’s failure to properly address this problem that is so common and dangerously serious. Readers familiar with Dr. McLaren’s critique of psychiatry in his earlier books will know how brutally honest and impassioned he gets when asking mainstream psychiatry for scientific explanations backing their practices of diagnoses and treatments. This book is no exception and Dr. McLaren takes on psychiatry and the establishment science with full force. He demands answers and points to the abusive practices of professional psychiatrists when it comes to seeing patients.
The educational value of this book cannot be overstated. Dr. McLaren is a scientist who adheres to the unadulterated standards of science and requires psychiatry to stay on track; where it derails, he points it out and demands explanations while cautioning readers to beware of the deceits and misinformation offered as “science” by those who use the word for financial and other interests. But the author also appeals to readers’ compassion by showing how unsuspecting patients are robbed of their money and health in the heartless machinery of medical establishment that makes millions of patients with little care for their stability and relief.
There is hope in this book. Dr. McLaren tells about how he successfully treated deep-seated anxiety spanning over years, even decades of patients’ lives without leaving them bankrupt or addicted to drugs that are frequently and widely over-prescribed to them by greed-driven psychiatrists.
Anxiety: The Inside Story is a book that everyone must read. It is the story of all of us who, as humans, are vulnerable to fear at one point or another in our lives. It won’t be wrong to say that this is an eye-opening and a life-saving book.
Format: Print
ISBN: 9781615994106
Availability: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/anxiety-the-inside-story-niall-mclaren/1129740793
Anxiety comes in so many shapes that for the longest time I didn’t even realize I had it. I mean, my face gets tingly and I get horribly dizzy, but my heart never races, I don’t feel scared, I thought it was an interaction with something…. So much more we need to understand about this issue. Which would you say was the most informative chapter of this book?
Now that’s a challenging question – putting my finger on one. Each chapter deals with a separate issue. The book has 4 sections and each section has multiple chapters dealing with the main theme of that section. I personally found the 3rd section most interesting – it deals with different ways in which anxiety manifests itself. For example the chapter Distraction discusses various kinds of distractions various people engage in – and interestingly crime is one of them. So that section sheds light on many things anxious people would do to counter their anxiety.