ROBERT C. SMITH, MD

NEW BOOK COMING SOON:  HAS MEDICINE LOST ITS MIND?

Prometheus Books will publish Has Medicine Lost Its Mind? in hardcover and e-book as a lead title of their Spring 2025 season.

Has Medicine Lost Its Mind? examines America’s poor state of mental health care and offers a strategy for correcting it. 

Untreated mental illnesses devastate the American population, far worse since COVID-19. You’ve heard of the many tragic deaths from suicides and overdoses, but many more of us end up so disabled with nonlethal psychological issues—such as depression, anxiety, or substance abuse—that we cannot, for example, go to church, attend movies, play golf, go shopping, visit grandchildren, or have sex. Worse yet, these difficulties often mushroom into more serious complications such as divorce, job loss, school failure, substance abuse, incarceration, and homelessness.

Has Medicine Lost Its Mind? sounds a clarion call to activate the public to instigate change in the way the US currently deals with mental health problems—because the medical profession shows little interest in change. 

Here’s the unaddressed problem: greatly reduced quality, access, and safety of care for anyone suffering from psychological problems. Only 25 percent of patients with mental illnesses in the US have any access to care because there is so little help available, over 90 million Americans with a significant mental disorder in any year. Has Medicine Lost Its Mind? shows why this sorry state occurred and how we can improve your care, while simultaneously reducing our nation’s overall health care budget by as much as trillions of dollars.

• Psychology Today Blogs by Dr. Smith
  • Key mental health issue
  • The need for a National Institute of Health Education
  • How to effectively communicate with each other
  • Many mental health diagnoses missed

• Recent research articles supporting the solution found in the book
  • Mental health care can be taught
  • The low cost of Dr. Smith’s proposed solution to the mental health crisis

• Keynote Address about a central theme of the book:  Emotions and Communication:  A Darwinian and Psychoanalytic Survival Perspective. 2021 International Conference for Communication in Healthcare (begins at 8:35 minute time point)

• Podcast:  Academy for Communication in Healthcare (ACH) Coffee Conversations—Reviewing the History of Doctor Vs Patient Centered Communication

Here are my two earlier books