AT THE bottom of Pandora’s box was hope – a thought worth hanging onto when reading about psychiatry. But read we should, since up to a third of us may at some time sport a label from the psychiatrists’ bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM). And the World Health Organization reckons that by 2020 depression will be the second largest contributor to the global burden of disease.

Treatment and its failures are the burden of Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs and Richard Bentall’s Doctoring the Mind. The books’ subtitles signal intent: Kirsch’s is a …