Thou Shalt Not Kill

Abstract

On my desk sit some 30 or so textbooks,¹ two novels,² an autobiography³ and 50 psy journals. The textbooks represent less than 1 per cent of my library, much of which rests in boxes elsewhere. These 30 are worth about US$500, which might be all a commentator needs to know about the psy industry, a global economic endeavour supporting researchers, universities, pharma, clinicians and publishers. The titles before me are revealing; sociological and critical analyses of psy compete with historical accounts. There is an absence of books that might be subsumed under variants of “A Guide to Curing X Using Y: An Evidence-Based Approach”. Contemporary psy practitioners are likely to have shelves more populated by books of the latter type. Whether or not they read them is unknown and, to the publishing industry, unimportant. The barely read volumes on the shelf behind me attest to my own bias.⁴