The Mind Has Mountains

McHugh writes with a wit and elegance almost extinct in his professional neighborhood.

It is impossible to read these essays and not feel challenged to position onself on the issue under discussion.

Well-written, sometimes elegant.

[McHugh] examines with wit, common sense, and humanity several trends in modern psychiatry.

A well-written and thought-provoking volume of essays that gives mental health professionals and interested lay readers one view into topics that have been prominent at the interface between psychiatry and society for the past two decades.

Paul McHugh is such a wonderful writer, and so brilliant a theorist, that reading him is at once an aesthetic delight and a gripping intellectual adventure. The pleasure provided by these essays—which are enriched and enlivened by fascinating stories drawn from decades of clinical experience—is heightened by the brilliant light they cast on the true nature of psychiatry and on those mountains of the mind that Dr. McHugh never stops struggling to fathom and to climb.

Paul McHugh has one of the finest minds, and sharpest tongues, in American psychiatry. He has collected some of the most foolish and misguided claims of his colleagues and examined them with crisp logic, common sense, clinical expertise, and scientific sophistication. I have never had so much fun while being educated, or so much education while having fun.

Paul McHugh is one of the best and most original writers in psychiatry or psychology. He is iconoclastic, idealistic, deeply informed, and is one of the most important influences on generations of psychiatric researchers and clinicians. The Mind Has Mountains is the essence of McHugh's ideas. No one will agree with everything he writes—I don't—but no one who reads this book will remain unaffected by the clarity and importance of his thinking. He is a teacher of the first rank.