Vaughan Bell

Those They Called Idiots traces the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England to the nineteenth-century asylum and care in today's society. Using evidence from civil and criminal court-rooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels, art and caricature, it explores the explosive intermi...

Winner of the 2021 BPS Popular Science Book Award'Read this incredible book. I wept and I learnt' - Prof Tanya Byron'This book comes from the heart' - Roman Kemp 'Compassionate, personal and thought-provoking' - Prof Steve PetersWhen you are faced with the unthinkable, this is the book you can turn to.Suicide is baffling and devastating in equal me...

Hypeology will expose the bias, hype, incompetence and fraud that plague the peer-reviewed world where many of the most seductive and striking scientific studies originate, and will take a Freakonomics-style look at the implications of this crisis for us all.A whole industry of books and TED-talks has been built on the findings of psychological stu...

Lewis Wolpert had it all -- a successful scientific career and a happy home life -- when his struggles with clinical depression began. Although he had often dealt with the blues, he had never been seriously depressed before the illness took over his life. Overwhelmed, he was no longer able to think properly, let alone work, and his mind turned to s...

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. P...

A classic in the field of mental health, one of the few credible critiques of the anti-psychiatry movement which retains its significance today, Psycho Politics includes scholarly appraisals of the ideas of Goffman, Laing, Szasz and Foucault and proposals for a politics of mental health which neither separates mind and body, nor abdicates responsib...

Eric R. Kandel, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his foundational research into memory storage in the brain, is one of the pioneers of modern brain science. His work continues to shape our understanding of how learning and memory work and to break down age-old barriers between the sciences and the arts.In his seminal new ...

Amphetamines have had a relatively short, though chequered history. From their use in wartime, their abuse by the beat generation, up to the popularity of Ecstasy in the late 20th century, many have found amphetamines an enjoyable, though unpredictable, stimulant. More than that though, amphetamine-based treatments have been found to have beneficia...

Poppy tears, opium, heroin, fentanyl: humankind has been in thrall to the “Milk of Paradise” for millennia. The latex of papaver somniferum is a bringer of sleep, of pleasurable lethargy, of relief from pain—and hugely addictive. A commodity without rival, it is renewable, easy to extract, transport, and refine, and subject to an insatiable global ...

Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Tourette's, multiple sclerosis, stroke: all are neurological illnesses that create dysfunction, distress, and disability. With their symptoms ranging from impaired movement and paralysis to hallucinations and dementia, neurological patients present myriad puzzling disorders and medical challenges. Throughout the nineteenth...