- PERSAUD
TOLD TO WITHDRAW
BOOK IN PLAGIARISM ROW
The
Sunday Times (London) April 16 2006
Brian
Deer
RAJ PERSAUD, Britain’s most high-profile
psychiatrist, is facing demands to withdraw his
bestselling book from sale after senior academics
said that long passages appear to have been copied
from their work.
Substantial portions of the 524-page book, From the
Edge of the Couch, seem to have been taken from the
publications of leading psychologists and
psychiatrists, sometimes with barely a word changed.
In recent months Persaud, 42, has been dogged by
allegations of plagiarism over his journalistic
output. Last week an inquiry by King’s College,
London, where he held an honorary position, found
“some substance” to these claims which have
led to his suspension as presenter of All in the
Mind, the BBC Radio 4 series.
Problems with the book, subtitled “bizarre
psychiatric cases and what they teach us about
ourselves”, appear to be more extensive than
those in other Persaud writings about which
complaints have been made.
“What they ought to do is recall this
book,” said Professor Richard Bentall, head of
experimental clinical psychology at Manchester
University, who plans to ask the British
Psychological Society, the profession’s
regulator, to investigate. “They should take all
copies from the bookshops and issue an apology
forthwith.”
Bentall was surprised to discover that almost 60
lines of Persaud’s introduction were only
slightly modified from a paper that Bentall had
co-authored in 2001. “We wrote those two
pages,” said Bentall. “He didn’t write
them.”
In another example, writing about people who think
that they are werewolves, Persaud warns: “Not
infrequently, bizarre and chaotic sexuality is
expressed in a primitive way through lycanthropic
symptoms. Patients whose internal fears exceed their
coping capabilities may externalise them via
projection and constitute a serious threat to
others.”
Yet a 1977 article in the American Journal of
Psychiatry reports: “Not infrequently, bizarre
and chaotic sexuality is expressed in a primitive way
through lycanthropic symptoms. Patients whose
internal fears exceed their coping capabilities may
externalise them via projection and constitute a
serious threat to others.”
Persaud lists 180 academics in his book’s
acknowledgments. Bentall and others say that he
e-mailed them asking permission to refer to their
patient cases, but did not say that he planned to
copy their writing.
Persaud did not respond to phone calls or e-mails,
but Bantam Press, the book’s publisher, said:
“We understand that Dr Persaud's book was fully
researched and that third-party contributors were
aware of and consented to the publication of their
material, which was in turn fully acknowledged in the
book.”
BBC
radio: hear a Persaud plagiarism victim interviewed
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