This book is quite a challenge to psychiatrists, as before having a chance to form their own take on the contemporary ‘crisis of psychiatry’ the book's front page blasts out the author's verdict on the matter: psychiatry is ‘a dead man walking’.

The author tackles contemporary psychiatry through the lens of Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher charged with heresy in the mid-17th century. Today, Baruch Spinoza is lauded as one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment. Spinoza was the first writer who dared to separate philosophy from theology, and religion from politics. For him, the Bible was a man-made instrument forcing believers into subjugation.

The author posits that Spinoza, if alive today, would be the ideal character to raise decisive questions on psychiatry, such as whether psychiatrists and psychologists are being used by authorities to compel individuals to adjust to an unjust dehumanising society. Are biological theories of mental illness diverting attention from societal ills causing emotional suffering and behavioural disturbances, with doctors pathologising dissenters? Are psychiatrists undermining mutual aid and non-hierarchical organisations? Quite a provocative start for a book, which I recommend, despite its flaws, to clinical colleagues.

Bruce Levine is a practising clinical psychologist in the USA, and a radical, sophisticated writer. On mental health issues, he is known to condemn technological and pharmaceutical approaches to mental crises.

Taking the original approach of bringing the medieval philosopher to life, Levine provides an eloquent and fact-based review on the ‘evidence-based’ saga of brain-only-based biological research, and the deeply rooted hierarchical power of psychiatric associations. This book could raise professionals’ awareness of the internationally widespread, ongoing complicity of psychiatrists and psychologists in medical experiments on human participants including torture, isolation, enforced psychotropic drugging and new technologies of brain control.

The book is also a fresh take on the enormous breadth of human behaviour, expression and creativity – avoiding labels of illness while confronting professionals with our illness-ridden and rigid ICD/DSM terminology for our fellow humans. The book also provides encouragement for doctors, families and communities to acknowledge our share in the breakdown of interaction that leads to individual ‘illness’.

The book thus offers a radical critique of present psychiatric practice, but nevertheless suffers from the overblown claim to have untangled the ‘Gordian Knot’ of psychiatric illness (grounded in professionals’ rigid belief of what normality should look like). Its stance on everyday community and emergency psychiatry is also too distanced: avoiding the complex handling of mental aspects of violence-, alcohol- and drug-related turmoil, abuse issues and serious crime. It fails to address what roles present psychiatrists should have – leaving me guessing that the profession should vanish in an abyss between a widely tolerant psychology and a well-equipped neuro(bio)logy.

Levine has produced a well-written and well-meaning critical approach to an institution, but sadly it does not transcend the divide between anti-psychiatry and the bio-psychiatric establishment. Psychiatry is neither a culture-only based science nor a purely empirical one, but remains on the border of both.