Ethics International Press

The Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series

Creator and lead editor: Eric Maisel
Editors: Chuck Ruby and Arnoldo Cantu

The Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series presents solicited chapters from international experts on a wide variety of underexplored subjects. This is a series for mental health researchers, teachers, and practitioners, for parents and interested lay readers, and for anyone trying to make sense of anxiety, depression, and other emotional difficulties. The series recognizes and appreciates those who have contributed to the abundance of literature critiquing the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the biomedical model of mental health, and the practice of psychiatric diagnosing. 

Latest Volume in the Series

The Human Experience Specialist: The Next Evolution in Helping

The Human Experience Specialist describes a new sort of helper who relies on an understanding of human nature—who humans are, what they need, and what helps them—to meet individuals in distress “where they are at.” It paints a picture of what they know (and don’t know), what they do (and don’t do), how they are trained, and how society is likely to regard them.

As a society and a world, with our epidemics of depression, anxiety, addiction, loneliness, job dissatisfaction, and existential malaise, we need more than the chemicals of psychiatry, the rah-rah of coaching, and the mechanical talk of psychotherapy. We need wise helpers who understand human nature and can provide what sufferers actually need. This new helper is the human experience specialist.

The Human Experience Specialist is the ninth volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series.

Coming in 2026/2027

Big Pharma and the Making of Modern Mental Illness: A Critical Inquiry into Psychiatric Drug Efficacy and Harm

Editors: Arnoldo Cantu, Jeffrey Lacasse, & Eric Maisel

This book examines the contested terrain of contemporary psychopharmacology, arguing that widespread use of psychiatric drugs rests on an unstable evidence base and carries neglected long-term risks. Drawing on research that questions the clinical significance of drug–placebo differences, as well as critiques of trial designs confounded by withdrawal effects, it shows how flagship efficacy claims often obscure modest benefits and substantial harms.

These narratives are situated within a political economic analysis of how pharmaceutical industry funding, marketing, and data management shape diagnostic practices, clinical decision-making, and public understandings of “mental illness.” 

The book calls for a reimagining of mental health care that prioritizes informed consent, withdrawal-safe prescribing, and nonpharmacological forms of support.

Big Pharma and the Making of Modern Mental Illness is the tenth Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series.

The Medicated Mind: First Person Accounts of Life on Psychiatric Drugs

Editors: Arnoldo Cantu, Jeffrey Lacasse, & Eric Maisel

This volume focuses on the experience being on psychiatric medications, the direct benefits, indirect benefits (like the placebo effect), and negative consequences of being on psychiatric medications, and the saga of trying to get off of and live without psychiatric medications. Users describe their physical, psychological and existential challenges dealing with the powerful chemicals that today form the first-line “treatment” of so-called mental disorders.

Anchoring chapters will look at the following meta issues: the extent to which user reports can and should be considered accurate, reliable and/or valuable information, the absence of official guidelines and regulatory narratives that would protect users, and the question of how to situate first-person reports in understanding human distress.

The Medicated Mind is the eleventh Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series.

Holding on to the Human in a Digital World: Concerns, Practices and Designs for Resistance and Resilience

Editors:  Dr. Deborah Tatar and Dr. Christian Matheis

COMING IN 2026/2027

Discussions of conscience, compassion, and the human need for community are often deprecated in conversations about technology, especially in settings with the authority to design, implement, and evaluate the systems that increasingly shape our lives. This volume gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars — philosophers, technologists, psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, economists, designers — to take up questions of how coding molds selves and societies, often toward cruelty, alienation, and shallow compliance; and to put forward frameworks, practices, and designs that steward judgment, dialogue, presence, dignity, and mutual flourishing.

Holding on to the Human in a Digital World is the twelfth volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series.

Artists in Crisis: Rethinking the Mental Health Challenges of Creative and Performing Artists

We are facing global mental health challenges and crises with multiple causes. One specific crisis that this volume in the EIP Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry series intends to address is the crisis facing creative and performing artists, who display significantly higher rates of distress and difficulty than do members of the general population.

The book addresses the questions: What are the lived experiences of our contemporary creative and performing artists? What are the specific, identifiable challenges of the creative life? To what extent are a creator’s troubles a function of the creative personality (if there is one), the nature of creative work, the rigors of the creative life, or everyday human difficulties—or all four? What sorts of answers have been provided by the helping professions so far? Specifically, how does psychiatry frame and view these matters and what sort of special help, if any, does it provide? What might a better future for the mental health of artists look like?

This groundbreaking book tackles the unhelpful mythology surrounding the creative life (e.g., the myth of the suffering genius) and provides new perspectives and new answers of real value to the tens of millions of individuals who devote their lives to the arts.

Artists in Crisis is the seventh Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series.

Existential Wellness: Human-Centered Approaches as Alternatives to the Medical Model

Existential Wellness provides the first-ever comprehensive look at how existential ideas and practices function as powerful and ethical alternatives to the medical model of “diagnosing and treating mental disorders.”

Existentialism presents certain ideas about what it means to be human, about the tasks and challenges of being human, and about ways in which individuals flee from and avoid those tasks and challenges. It has its favorite vocabulary, just as other bodies of thought do, including words like suffering, despair, anxiety, absurdity, uncertainty, freedom, authenticity, and personal responsibility.

The meeting of two threads, the existential and the therapeutic, gave rise to existential therapy, existential psychiatry, and existential coaching. Practitioners who added the word “existential” to their self-description shared certain beliefs about what helping was all about.

Existential wellness is a contemporary idea and the “next step” in existential thinking. It invites human beings not only to mull over existential questions—about the purpose or purposes of life, about the nature of meaning, about one’s place in the universe, about the requirements of a personal, self-created philosophy of life—but to deeply embrace the facts of existence and to arrive at a place of relative serenity in a sea of anxiety. It invites us to not only think about life but to create a life that works, existentially speaking.

Existential Wellness is the eighth Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series.

Critiquing the Psychiatric Model

Critiquing the Psychiatric Model is the first Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. Understanding the current systems of psychology and psychiatry is profoundly important. So is exploring alternatives. Critiquing the Psychiatric Model sets out to present a clear picture of the current “mental disorder paradigm,” one that claims an ability to “diagnose and treat mental disorders” and that provides “medication” as its primary treatment. Critiquing the Psychiatric Model traces the history of the psychiatric model and its “diagnostic manual” and identifies its flaws and problem areas by presenting more than twenty solicited chapters from experts worldwide.

Humane Alternatives to the Psychiatric Model

Humane Alternatives to the Psychiatric Model is the second Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. Understanding the current systems of psychology and psychiatry is profoundly important. So is exploring alternatives. Humane Alternatives to the Psychiatric Model presents a variety of alternative models and approaches that are available in addition to, or instead of, the current predominant psychiatric “mental disorder” model. Humane Alternatives to the Psychiatric Model provides more than twenty solicited chapters from experts worldwide, among them Peter Kinderman, former president of the British Psychological Society, and other respected cultural commentators and mental health experts.

Deconstructing ADHD

Deconstructing ADHD is the third volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. Understanding the current systems of psychology and psychiatry is profoundly important. So is exploring alternatives. Millions of children and their parents worldwide are affected by the current biomedical paradigm by which childhood mental illnesses are addressed. This volume focuses on the “mental disorder” known as ADHD and examines whether or not it should be considered a mental disorder, and how the observable behaviors that get a child an ADHD label can be remediated without the use of powerful gateway chemicals.

Theoretical Alternatives to the Psychiatric Model of Mental Disorder Labeling

Theoretical Alternatives recognizes and appreciates those who have contributed to the abundance of literature critiquing the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the biomedical model of mental health, and the practice of psychiatric diagnosing. It intends to move past that discourse, and present macro and system-level alternatives to DSM and ICD diagnosing (the World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), in the form of conceptually developed frameworks, taxonomies, and models to guide clinical work and theory.

Practical Alternatives to the Psychiatric Model of Mental Illness

Practical Alternatives provides practical and implementable alternatives to psychiatric diagnosing. These discussions will be set against the unique backdrop that is managed care, and the contemporary system of healthcare in the United States. It likewise looks at worldwide practices that have arisen in different cultures and as a result of various alternative frameworks. The aim of this book is to provide people, including medical and psychiatric professionals, researchers and students, with practical and varied clinical approaches they can utilize, that sidestep the need to rely on psychiatric diagnoses.

Institutionalized Madness: The Interplay of Psychiatry and Society’s Institutions

Institutionalized Madness takes a critical, wide-ranging look at the ways in which psychiatry and the psychiatric “mental disorder” paradigm are embedded within various institutions. It examines how the specialty of psychiatry and its accompanying controversial menu of “mental disorders”, or “mental illnesses” are omnipresent throughout various facets of everyday life.

Issues that will be explored include how psychiatry and the law interact, such as in the areas of guardianship, informed consent, and expert testimony in courts. Other topics covered will be psychiatry’s influence on “Big Pharma,” the role of psychiatric diagnosis in schools (e.g., the provision of school-based services, such as Special Education support), the interplay between psychiatry and government (such as the mandated use of psychiatric diagnosis in healthcare), and more.