After thirty years in the profession, Dr. Tana Dineen has written an unflinching critique of modern Psychology and Psychotherapy. This controversial best-selling exposé of the Psychology Industry was first published in 1996. Now available in its revised, updated and less expensive 3rd edition, it is no less popular nor less explosive than when it first appeared. Cited in Time and the New York Times, among other wide-circulation publications, Tana Dineen's scathing attack on the abuses and misuses of corrupted psychotherapy is a must read for care-givers and care-takers alike. And for would-be care-takers too. Topics covered include Victim-Making, Fabricated Victims, Selling Psychology as a Science, The Business of Psychology, The Technology of Victim-Making, The Rise to Power of the Psychology Industry, and Living in the Shadow of the Psychology Industry. Fully supported by end of book notes and index, and with a suggested reading list, this is one of the most important books on psychology to appear in recent years. The author has been often--and always unsuccessfully--attacked by representatives of corporate psychology who have resorted to character assassination rather than reason to try and prove Dr. Dineen wrong.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
...argues that psychology has changed from a respectable academic discipline into an industry eager to sell its products... -- The Mail on Sunday (London)
Renegade psychologist dukes it out with feelings folks. -- Mark Sauer, San Diego Union-Tribune
Tana Dineen...arguably the planet's preeminent psychotherapy critic. -- Michael Roberts, Denver Westword
Tana Dineen...the woman who put psychology on the couch. -- Lynn McAuley, Ottawa Citizen
This gun is not for hire! Clinician slams the expert-witness racket. -- LA Daily Journal
Renegade psychologist dukes it out with feelings folks. -- Mark Sauer, San Diego Union-Tribune
Tana Dineen...arguably the planet's preeminent psychotherapy critic. -- Michael Roberts, Denver Westword
Tana Dineen...the woman who put psychology on the couch. -- Lynn McAuley, Ottawa Citizen
This gun is not for hire! Clinician slams the expert-witness racket. -- LA Daily Journal
About the Author
A former practicing psychologist and director of a psychiatric hospital in Canada, Tana Dineen holds both a Master's and Ph.D in Psychology.
After a long career in the field, Dr Dineen came to the conclusion that psychology, originally a science dedicated to the curing of serious pathology, has become diluted into what is now a broad range of pseudo-science and pseudo-therapy. Patients with little seriously wrong are offered therapy which is often of unproven value and kept on a payment string for as long as possible, focusing on what the therapist claims is wrong with them rather than what is right with them. From th adage of a cure for every ill, we have arrived at an ill for every cure and the ever-increasing use of psychology of little probatgive value in legal cases which often were no more based on scientific logic than the witch trials of centuries past became too much for Dr Dineen to stand. No longer believing psychology could reform itself from the inside, she left clinical practice and now runs a B&B in Victoria, British Columbia. She also writes several columns each month on various topics for Canadian newspapers.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
106 of 114 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nation of Victims,
By Robert Sibley (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing to People (Paperback)
When a tragedy occurs at some school, office or worksite, policemen, firefighters, paramedics or rescue workers will rush to the scene to provide a much-needed service, saving lives. Increasingly, however, we see another so-called helping professional on the scene - the trauma or grief counsellor - who's been called in to save psyches.Somehow, it's now the norm after every school shooting, car crash or airline disaster to bring in psychologists who, Moses-like, will lead those who survive the tragedy or even witnessed it to the promised land of "wellness." Somehow we've come to accept the idea that stranger with a few initials behind her name is needed to help us deal with the experience of violence or death. Where did we ever get the infantile idea that after some tragedy - a parent's loss of a child, for example - we're supposed to be "healed"? Dr. Tana Dineen, in her book "Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People," answers to that question. And a fine and devastating answer it is. Well-researched, sharply focussed and leavened with numerous concrete examples, her critique of the profession of psychology should make you want to, well, burn your self-help books and motivational tapes. The opening paragraph neatly sums up her argument: "Psychology presents itself as a concerned and caring profession working for the good of its clients, but the effects are damaged people, divided families, distorted justice, destroyed companies and a weakened nation." That's a stinging indictment. And after you read Ms. Dineen's book you'll be hard pressed not to agree with it. Certainly, Dineen is careful to acknowledge that in the hands of dedicated researchers, psychology remains a respected field of scientific inquiry. The focus of her scorn is the clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and sundry counsellors and mental health practitioners who distort or ignore the research and reduce it to ego-stroking psychobabble and feel-good placebos. A PhD in psychology herself, Dineen spent nearly 20 years as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in Ontario. In the mid-1990s, she packed it in. As she put it in an interview: "I couldn't maintain my integrity in a profession that is almost devoid of integrity. This book is my apology for decades of biting my lip about the pernicious effects psychologists are having on individuals and society." Perhaps her most explosive argument is that refuting the concept of recovered memories. Dineen cites numerous cases where people, usually men, have been falsely accused of sexual abuse crimes based on such "memories." According to Dineen, there is no reputable scientific evidence that these memories are anything more than fanciful inventions. Because of this and other misuses of research, Dineen says psychologists should be barred from testifying in court as "experts" on human behaviour. Indeed, most of what psychologists is little more that job-creation, she argues. Therapists need patients, so they create disorders with which they can label their erstwhile consumers. In this way everybody becomes "abnormal" and in need of treatment. The industry is also fond of inflating symptoms far beyond the original condition they once described. For example, the word "trauma" once referred to a physical injury. But now, after much "semantic inflation," trauma covers anything that upsets us. Ditto for "addiction;" it no longer refers to drug or alcohol abuse, but also to sex and shopping. Psychology may have once been part of science's laudatory effort to mitigate life's hardships, but Dineen ably demonstrates how the psychology industry has gone, well, crazy in its attempt to pathologize every aspect of the human condition and turn every upset into a "dis-ease" in need of therapeutic treatment. What Dineen's book ultimately reveals is the steady sentimentalization of society. A sentimentalist is someone in denial, and what she denies is reality. The sentimentalist assumes that good ends can be achieved without effort, self-discipline, patience or sacrifice. Such sentimentalism might be tolerated if it were confined to a deluded few. But western societies increasingly driven by sentimentalists promoting social engineering schemes. We are a society that runs whining to politicians who'll feel out pain or, more often than not, to a therapist who'll assure us that we aren't stupid, lazy or greedy, but victims of poor parenting. In our secularized world, psychotherapy has replaced religion in that, like religion, it is what we turn to to cope with the vagaries of existence. The difference, though, is that psychology, unlike religion, seeks to eliminate those experiences that define what it is to be human. At the core of human experience is the mystery of both the grandeur and the misery of self-conscious mortality. Unlike animals, humans know they will die. Yet, if we have courage, we also learn that our awareness of death gives life its juice and joy. It is because our lives are so painfully transient that they can be so achingly meaningful. Psychotherapy seeks to deny those experiences that make us human. As such, it is a threat to our freedom. As philosopher Leon Kass puts it, the ultimate aim of psychotherapy is "to order human experience in terms of easy, predictable contentment." But if we are always haunted by death, there is the need for character and courage to live with what we know is ineradicable. Psychotherapy, however, makes emotional security easy by eradicating the need for moral virtue. This has political consequences: Individuals freed from moral responsibility are no longer citizens, but patients or victims unable to manage their lives. As Dineen writes: "The psychology industry considers and treats people as children who, regardless of age, experience or status, must be protected, guided, sheltered and disciplined." But this smothering individual responsibility for the sake of self-esteem creates a depoliticized society of contented creatures who need only to be administered and kept passified. And that, as far as I can see, is a form of tyranny, albeit a nice one. If so, Dineen's book provides the valuable service of exposing the threat to our freedom posed by all those trauma counsellors rushing to rescue our shivering psyches.
52 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
When she hits the target she gets the bullseye,
By A Customer
This review is from: Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing to People (Paperback)
Dr. Dineen is certainly right when she attacks the many sloppy and poorly trained therapists in the world today. Psychology has become the new religion, and like all religions it has spawned a disturbing assortment of irrational cults. Foremost among them is "trauma theory"--the dogma that virtually all psychological problems stem from abuse and neglect in early childhood. The patient must, it follows, learn to hate the abusive parents and blame every disappointment and failure in life on them. What is not blamed on parents is blamed on "society" in general and on relatively trivial day to day traumas like finding a bug in your food, getting into a shouting match with your lover or having your purse snatched. The author is absolutely correct that there is no evidence that childhood experiences determine adult behavior, and that there are many people who have experienced far worse traumas than middle class Westerners could ever imagine and show no signs of psychopathology. Obviosly there is no need to bring everyone into the mental health system. There are those who need care and those who don't. Dineen exposes a virtual conspiracy among some mental health care providers to make everyone a patient and label everyone in society as fundamentally weak and flawed. Needless to say, I appreciated many aspects of this book. But before I sign off, I must complain about a few things. Dr. Dineen is great at criticizing the quack theories and fuzzy thinking others, but offers few suggestions about helping those who actually have mental illnesses. At times, she seems to shrug the whole issue off. It is clear from the book that she does not take the approach of Thomas Szasz and deny that mental illness exists. For example, she refers to schizophrenia as a biological condition, which it is. I was a little uncertain, however, about where she stands on clinical depression, manic depression and the various anxiety disorders like O.C.D Her tone seems very critical of anyone who is in treatment for any kind of "neurotic" disorder. However, the same type of modern brain research which proved that schizophrenia is a brain disease suggests the same thing about many types of depression and anxiety disorders. They are really not "neuroses" or psychological problems in adjustment at all. When a person suffering from clinical depression is lying in bed sobbing and unable to get shower or get dressed, it is not because they are lazy or weak. It is because they have a chemical imbalance that makes their thinking disorganized and their feelings oversensitive. Dineen seems to ignore most of the brain science revolution in the past two decades. Instead of abandoning quack "trauma" therapy for genuine empirical facts about human behaviors and the illnesses which can effect them, she opts for a lot of old platitudes about vaguely defined "personal responsibility." But being told to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep your chin up can no more cure clinical depression than it can anemia or diabetes. To put it another way, lets say you have panic attacks. A run of the mill trauma therapist would blame your parents and say that maybe they had frightened and terrorized you as a child, and if you hated and rejected them enough you would be well. Dr. Dineen, it seems, would just consider you lazy and irresponsible and tell you to get a life. Both approaches would cause more harm than good. When it comes to psychiatric illness, it is not profitable to blame your parents or yourself--get medical care and adjust the flawed brain chemistry. Also get a good non-judgmental therapist to practice supportive therapy if you are in a crisis period. Dineen gets so caught up in bashing her opponants that she forgot to guide people who actually need mental health care in the right direction.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must-read book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing to People (Paperback)
What some readers have been saying about MANUFACTURING VICTIMS:
"This book is dynamite and I can't wait to see the reaction. Manufacturing Victims is a sizzling expose of the Psychology Industry. While showing tremendous compassion towards real victims of rape, accidents and torture, Dr. Tana Dineen skillfully takes the Psychology Industry to task for destroying families, promoting hostile views of men and women, promoting distrust and suspicion, and misusing science."
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington, co-author, The Myth of Repressed Memory
"Manufacturing Victims is a spirited and deeply principled critique of the inanities and abuses of contemporary psychology. Let us hope it serves as a welcome antidote for our society's spreading addiction to toxic therapy."
Theodore Roszak, author,The Making of a Counter Culture
"A devastating critique of the business of psychotherapy. Well done. Badly needed. Long overdue. It will make a lot of people mad. I hope it makes them take a hard look at the sins of the profession.
Dr. Sam Keen, former editor, Psychology Today, author, A Fire in the Belly
"This penetrating, insightful and carefully documented expose will add depth and power to the national chorus of voices calling for legislative reform of the mental health industry. Dr. Dineen has performed a major service to vulnerable consumers and taxpayers who are too often called upon to bear the burdens of dangerous experimental procedures and other forms of consumer fraud disguised as `mental health treatment.'"
Prof. R. Christopher Barden, President, National Associationfor Consumer Protection in Mental Health Practices
"As many of us are aware, many clinical psychologists and psychriatists are `manufacturing victims,' and living off their creations, who are, sadly, real people. All of us concerned with what is going on can profit greatly from reading this book cover to cover."
Dr. Robyn Dawes, Acting Department Head, Department ofSocial and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University,author, House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth
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