Science and Future Choice. Vol. 2. TechnologicaI Challenges for Social Change ed. by Philip W. Hemily and M. N. Üzdas (review)

74 Books The book is well organized. About half of it, Part I, isdevoted to the significance of the experimental evidence that is described in Part II. Throughout, the descriptions and explanations are clearly written in a manner accessible to visual artists and art teachers as well as to anyone lacking special knowledge about brain functioning. The glossary is a valuable section, and the selected bibliography is a good one, up-to-date and certainly a fine guide for further reading. Listed are the reports of the pioneering investigators such as Roger Sperry, Joseph Bogen, Wilder Penfield, Karl Pribram and Michael Gazzaniga, and the more popular accounts of Robert Ornstein, Howard Gardner and Maya Pines. Mind Control. Peter Schrag. Pantheon, New York, 1978.327 pp., $10.00. Reviewed by Alan N. West* In this book the author indicts the mental health industry, which, the author believes, through its kinship with the criminal justice and other governmental systems, has evolved into society's primary agent for the control of behavioral deviance. The basic thesis of the book is that the ethic of behavioral uniformity has become more and more pervasive and that the progressive shift from a punitive to a therapeutic framework allows the techniques of behavior control to be 'more easily applied to people whose form of deviance, if any, is too marginal to justify the harsher, more direct, and more expensive forms of intervention ....'. The mental health establishment does not treat; rather, it pacifies, disaffirms and segregates superfluous and unruly individuals: 'The come-on is cure, but the merchandise is management; and what had been a mystique of human perfectibility becomes a rationale for keeping the imperfect from causing trouble.' Control has been implemented in the following ways: Psychiatric diagnoses have been extended into the realm of common life problems so that an increasingly wider spectrum of social misfits can be designated 'disordered'. The development of a wide array of psychoactive drugs has made it possible to 'treat' (i.e., stupefy) huge numbers of these misfits quickly and inexpensively while providing the illusion of treatment legitimacy and specificity. And the 'Ultimate Weapons' (electroconvulsive 'shock' therapy, psychosurgery, closed-ward token economies, etc.) have been reserved for the extreme cases, thus making the milder forms of intervention more palatable to the general public. As the book's title suggests, the author frequently flirts with paranoia ('The surveillance is ubiquitous'). He surveys the interdependent activities of the criminal justice, financial and social service sub-systems of government and envisions 'the beginning of a network oftotat intervention from which no aspect of the client's life is secure and through which each agency is in a position to know what every other agency knows'. Once someone is inducted into the system, the individual's private activities become open to anyone. However, there is no Big Brother; rather. the system has developed into a mindless, devouring beast that no one can control. Several points should be made concerning the style in which this book was written: There are far too many long, rambling sentences. replete with semicolons and parenthetical comments, so that one frequently loses the trail of the argument because of the overgrowth of verbiage. This wordiness contributes to the polemical tone of the book. The readability of the text is sometimes diminished through redundancy and overuse of supporting statistics. Many of the points could have been made with fewer words. Also, in some instances the presentation and interpretation of data are transparently biased to favor Schrag's position. On the positive side. he has conscientiously gathered and organized an immense amount of material. This material is well referenced in 61 pages of notes, so that interested readers have ample opportunity independently to review the sources for nearly every statement of fact made in this book. There are several interesting illustrative anecdotes about individuals whose lives *Dept. of Psychology, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, U.S.A. have taken a turn for the worse because of interventions made in the name of 'mental health'. For the most part, sufficient evidence has been amassed at least to establish the plausibility of the major claims of the author. The book deserves a reading by...