Ten top psychiatry critiques

James Davies graduated from the University of Oxford in 2006 with a PhD in social and medical anthropology. He is a senior lecturer in social anthropology and psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton.

Davies is also a psychotherapist, who started working for the National Health Service in 2004 and he is a member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy.

Cracked: The Unhappy Truth about Psychiatry, his first book written for a wider audience, is a critical exploration of modern-day psychiatry based on interviews with leaders of the profession.

One of his ten top books that challenge received wisdom about mental illness and how to treat it, as told to the Guardian:

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell has become a guru of the "smart thinking" set. There is a simple reason: he knows how to tell a story. And this book is rich with compelling stories about men and women who, as he puts it, "are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us". What is gripping – and sometimes tragic – about outliers is that they are so regularly misunderstood. We are too prone to recast their difference as pathology. Gladwell deploys insightful psychological research to challenge our most basic assumptions about normality.

Read about the other books on the list.

Outliers is one of Chris Bohjalian's six favorite books about plane crashes.

--Marshal Zeringue