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"Early in Our Necessary Shadow, his lucid, humane and in many ways well-balanced account of the nature and meaning of psychiatry, Tom Burns, professor of social psychiatry at Oxford University, makes a supremely telling remark: "I am convinced psychiatry is a major force for good or I would not have spent my whole adult life in it." This is a form of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc ("After this, therefore because of this"), and it seems strange that an academic of such standing should so blithely retail it because, of course, if we reverse the statement it makes just as much sense: "Having spent my whole adult life as a psychiatrist I must maintain the conviction that it is a major force for good.""

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