Like Anthony Clare (eg. see previous post), Robin Murray took his position partly as a reaction to their understanding of Laing as blaming families for causing schizophrenia. This is actually a misunderstanding of his view, about which Laing complained repeatedly (eg. see extract from my book chapter).
As I said in a post on my personal blog, it's interesting to see Murray questioning the call he made when he started in psychiatry. But he hasn't completely given up his belief in the brain hypothesis of mental illness. For example, in the interview, he talks about dopamine being involved as the "final common pathway for psychosis".
Like him, I'm not encouraging psychiatrists "slagging each other off", but there is a genuine issue about the conceptual nature of mental illness. It's difficult for people, like Robin Murray, to accept that an organic basis is insufficient for understanding mental activity. He's taken this step of faith and to retract it and realise he's made a mistake would be like giving up a religion (see previous post). I'm not necessarily encouraging him to be a philosopher, but he does need to accept that there is a mind-body problem. Organisms as a whole are constantly maintaining their internal environment and cannot be explained mechanically (see another previous post). The activities of the mind cannot be derived completely from the laws of the physical world.
And, I do not want to be misunderstood. Of course I know that minds are enabled by brains. But this does not mean that minds are reducible to brains. To use a quote from Adolf Meyer that I have used before, "person disorders show through the brain but not necessarily in the brain" [Meyer's emphasis].
