Anatomy of an Epidemic MP3 CD – MP3 Audio, April 29, 2014

In 'Anatomy of an Epidemic' Robert Whitaker takes us on a journey and demonstrates how industrial compounds and various chemical 'magic bullets' evolved into the psychiatric drugs and 'blockbusters' as we know them today.He reveals the faulty logic, media deceptions, and special interests behind the various artificial epidemic(s) that were created to alert the public of their need for these so-called medicines in order to treat their newly discovered mental illnesses. He points out the amazing coincidental timing of the discovery of the widespread prevalence of these disorders in the public, parallel to the creation of a blockbuster to treat it. An epidemic of illness that is, of course, only just being fully understood, in the inevitable rush to treat it's various manifestations sooner and better.Is a rocket fuel compound called hydrazine the primogenitor of most modern 'anti' psych meds like antidepressants and antipsychotics and anxiolytics?We are told of the industrial origins of these chemicals. Of how hydrazine led to iaprozid, a treatment for tuberculosis, and eventually became an 'energizer' pill. We learn how, depressed patients treated with iaprozid, and who suffered side effects like mania and psychosis for weeks, would eventually find their depression symptoms abated completely. Does that not sound at all similar to drugs like Paxil, Zoloft and Prozac? Takes a few weeks to kick in? May have psychotropic side effects in the meantime?Whitaker explains how through lucky trial and error, phenothiazine, a compound sold by Dupont as a general pesticide became the miracle drug known as Thorazine. Thorazine worked so well as a 'chemical lobotomy' that previously delusional or aggressive patients could be released from institutionalization back into the community.We learn about a happy pill called Miltown which eventually led to benzos like Valium and Lorazapam which trapped people in a feedback loop so that if they should try to discontinue they found themselves battling an agonizing addiction and withdrawal far more powerful than say, heroin, which many addicted prison inmates sweat out after their first week or so behind bars. Some people, we find, can never, ever discontinue psych meds no matter how much they want to, because if they try, their mind and emotions malfunction too much, and only another dose of the drug relieves that distress again.Deeper in we learn of a super-trooper drug called methamphetamine that was issued to German soldiers in WWII during the winter to lessen fatigue, sharpen attention and keep up their morale which later became drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that young American teens, primarily boys, are forced to take to keep their wandering minds riveted on whatever their teacher is saying or doing in class.Whitaker tells us about psychiatry's arduous quest to become recognized as a legitimate science and their early treatments for insanity: from the dubious 'ice bath' to the Mengele-esque removal of organs, glands and teeth, to the biological shock treatments like insulin coma and electricity applied directly to the cranium to 'loosen the pattern' that psychosis had on the brain. Both methods reduced their patients to an infantile-like level of function, cured apparently, of their madness, at least temporarily, until the next episode or relapse.Psychiatrists have long wanted treatments that work for specific conditions like antibiotics do for infections in internal medicine. Whitaker clearly explains how it is really only the mechanical dispensing of prescriptions for a growing pharmacopoeia of 'anti-this' and 'anti-that' drugs for unproven mental 'diseases' (an idea that sprouted from and was nourished by--eventually disproved theories about various chemical imbalances) that actually makes psychiatry a 'real' branch of medicine.In the early to mid 90s Congress deregulated the pharmaceutical industry and ever since then the drug industry as a whole has been allowed to infiltrate nearly every form of media in existence with their advertising. The organizations that we would suppose exist to give us the straight dope on the science of mental illness and the real efficacy of medicinal treatments for it, like the FDA, APA and NIMH are, in fact, often seemingly in cahoots with them.Granted, the FDA has occasioned to put Black Box warnings on drugs, usually, only after public outcry. When enough people have died, maybe a drug will get a warning on it. Although, an independent review board assessing the FDA's decision invariably condemns the warning as 'hasty' and recommends more research first.The APA courts Big Pharma because, as Whitaker tells us, it is Big Pharma that equips psychiatry with their only effective chemical treatments for the mental diseases they write about in their diagnostic bible--the DSM. Drug companies and psychiatrists are likely bedfellows and their marriage has been an unbelievably, obscenely profitable arrangement for participants on both sides--leading to countless conflicts of interests.As in the case of Dr. Charles Nemeroff whose, as one snarky blogger once put it: "near-legendary prostitution of science to Big Pharma may hold some kind of record for the most conflicts of interest." In reference to how much stock he owned in, and how many corporate boards he sat on, of various pharmaceutical companies, as he provided expert testimony on various issues and sucked up millions of dollars in consulting fees. Dr. Nemeroff never found a drug he couldn't be paid to like and although his situation was extreme it is fairly endemic in the APA and was addressed by Loren Mosher years ago, in his now-infamous resignation letter from the APA.While it is true that previous directors of NIMH have gone on record stating (paraphrasing), "There is no conclusive evidence that schizophrenia is related to a dopamine imbalance nor is there any conclusive evidence that antipsychotics correct said imbalance," NIMH continues to toe the Big Pharma Party Line of mental disorders as chemical imbalances that need drug treatments even though they are aware that that relationship has been proven to be unsubstantiated by various studies and trials.I remember very vividly one day around during the summer of '95 or '96, sitting in the waiting room at my chiropractor's clinic and on an end table amongst a stack of adult magazines like 'Cosmo' I espied a children's magazine called 'Highlights' that I had read as a kid. Out of nostalgia, I picked it up and started flipping through it and lo and behold, right smack in the middle of it, was a two-page advertisement for Prozac.The left side was a child's drawing. A representation of a white, grey and black dreary, rainy world complete with a house, dog, and front yard. In the yard was a clearly unhappy, unsmiling stick figure drawing of 'Mommy' and also concerned diminutive stick figures of mom's kids, worry about mommy's sadness evident on their simple, compelling faces. At the bottom of the scene advertisers for Eli Lilly ask, "Is mommy sad?" In case the imagery wasn't obvious enough to any child.The right side featured the exact same kid's Crayola crayon drawing. Only now, the rain clouds were gone, a big round yellow sun was out and had a smiley face. Gone were the grays and blacks. The lawn was green. The house was red. The sky was blue. Mommy, the kids and the dog all seemed happy now. At the bottom of the advertisement, more crayon-style writing advised the child-reader to 'tell Mommy about Prozac'.Eli Lilly used artists and child psychologists to create an advertisement to prime little children into the medication modality and clearly tried to use these ads to communicate with kids what Prozac is and what it does and to get children to mention it to their mothers. The child 'nag' factor and mom's tendency to take notice of that is covered in the book 'Branded' and is obviously part of that strategy.Another obscene little fact is that Eli Lilly along with all the other pharma companies deliberately target women and mothers with antidepressant advertisements to make these otherwise healthy women want to be (even more) medicated. And evidence supports this trend. Right now, women are on twice as many antidepressants than men.It started way back with 'mother's little helper' and continues to this day, with advertisements for Abilifry and Geodont showing thoughtful-looking young women walking down beaches or doing yoga and a sales pitch telling them they could only be more empowered if they added a neuroleptic aka 'nerve clamp' aka mindwipe-in-a-bottle to their antidepressant or antiseizure drug regimen for the 'maintenance' (as in never-ending) treatment of bipolar or depression.Why has Congress not put the brakes on this and re-regulated this psychopathic, out-of-control, deceptive, calculating, money-hungry industry? It's been over ten years since you guys deregulated them and we can not trust a single thing out of their mouths. Always the suppressed truth gets subpoenaed in court a few years later after the newly patented blockbuster rakes in billions of dollars and we find, again and again, no matter the drug, that it was less effective than we were led to believe and causes more problems than they claim to treat.Is there not an obvious, repeating pattern here? Why are those of us without the power to change it the only ones who can see this? Why isn't anyone in charge in our government who actually has power, taking notes and doing something about it?'Anatomy of an Epidemic' covers another hot-button issue that a lot of people are not even aware of. Social workers for Child and Family Services perform a service to families and communities and one of those services is to take children out of abused homes. All social workers have presumably read about how abused or abandoned children often present a plethora of mood and behavioral disorders. It's part of their training.A social worker then takes the child who has had an intervention, brings them to a psychiatrist, tell the doc the child clearly has depression, bipolar, autism, adhd, ptsd, or whatever they think the child is likely to have (based on whether the child is crying or scowling, talkative or quiet, aggressive or passive) and ask that the psychiatrist treat and prescribe for the newly minted Ward of the State. Then these kids are dropped off at foster homes with three, four, five and in some cases, many more psychotropic drugs the foster parents are told are needed to address the child's illnesses.This will interest the reader. All children and teens who become wards of the State are automatically covered by either Medicaid or Medicare until they are an adult. So the social worker gets these institutional psychiatrists to prescribe all those drugs to the child and the money that was paid to Big Pharma for the cost of those drugs comes right from your pocket because you subsidize Medicare with taxes.Nearly every state in America seems to have a nice, neat, circular loop with Big Pharma. The state provides a continuously growing, constantly renewable source of child patients who 'plainly' are in dire need of polypharmacy. They get these kids on the latest most expensive blockbuster neuroleptics and moodstabilizers and you the citizen pay for it.These kids have no say in their treatment. None at all. Most are never, ever told they they can refuse once they reach a certain age, fourteen, fifteen or sixteen. By the time they are an adult, you can bet their brains have been rewired with extra serotonin and dopamine receptors and they have a major multi-psychiatric drug addiction. They often have secondary iatrogenic diseases, like irreversible motor neuropathy, incredible obesity and diabetes and they become mentally and physically disabled adults, living in adult group homes and go right back on Medicare.You know how I know all this? Because I am a former ward of the state and was a foster kid during the late 80s and early 90s and personally saw this growing epidemic of medicated kids with my own eyes while I was under the auspices of their care, living in group homes and residential placement facilities. I am a former 'bipolar child' and while I can't tell you why social workers seem to have this drugging mandate, I can tell you that what Robert Whitaker is talking about in 'Anatomy' is just the tip of the iceberg.I would say, if the government was actually serious about cutting down on the 800 some-odd new people being added to the disability rolls daily, that an immediate and total ban on forced polypharmacy medication for foster kids and wards of the state would be a good place to save some money and cut down on future disabled citizens. And because that ban did not happen today, a portion of the 800 people that will be added to disability by tonight includes those wards of the state and foster kids.There are some serious, serious problems going on right now in this country that show no signs of changing as long as Big Pharma continues to have undue influence over the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Psychiatric Association.'Anatomy of an Epidemic' shows us, in careful, exquisitely researched detail, how we got here, from there, with today's psychiatric pseudoscience, their fifteen-minute, drive-thru diagnoses and the resulting array of perpetual, addictive, and brain-altering maintenance treatments for them.In the final analysis, 'Anatomy of an Epidemic', like 'Mad in America', shows that psychiatry is the emperor with no clothes. Psychiatrists don't have any special insight into how the brain works. None. Right now, it's all about finding defective genes and their completely disproved chemical imbalance nonsense.If you are not willing to lie down for some electroshock or submit to medication roulette, the truth is, there is nothing psychiatry can do for you. And they don't like to admit it. That they paid for med school and the extra pharmacy education and yet their services are not needed to achieve a real mental recovery and their treatments cause more problems and quality of life issues than they mitigate.The scope of the book asks us to levy skepticism of and carefully reconsider all that we think or know to be true today about the science behind mental illness, the actual efficacy of magic bullet treatments and the sudden occurrences of new epidemics of mental illness, hot on the heels of new drugs to treat them.This treatise asks us to consider the realfact, not the goodfact. Not the facts the government has endorsed, but the facts readily available from studies, statistics, patient outcome surveys and anecdotal stories that are found in abundance in this amazing piece of critical journalism.I can not recommend 'Anatomy of an Epidemic' enthusiastically enough. It's brilliant, engrossing, and at times, very unsettling reading. It should make you upset. I cried more than once and wanted to put my fist through someone before I got halfway through it.This book explains the who, what, why and how, that was the reasoning behind the mind-destroying effects I unwillingly suffered while being coerced inpatient, under repeated threats of restraints and forced injections, to take powerful doses of lithium and a neurolepetic called Trilafon as a teenager.It explains in detail why I was told this great lie: That I could never recover from manic depression and schizophrenia; that I would always be afflicted, that my illnesses were the results of incurable hereditary genetic chemical imbalances. And why I had no choice but to take those drugs for the rest of my life.A prognosis which was clearly in error, because here I am, twenty years after my Dx, completely healed of those conditions, symptom free for over a decade, without the use of any of those so-called 'meds'.But my diagnosing pdoc apparently didn't know about Quaker retreats, Soteria houses or that according to Whitaker, Emile Kraeplin's findings show that schizophrenic and manic depressive incidences were episodic and not chronic and incurable. It was not until the New Era reductionist model of biological psychiatry came and took over everyone's opinions and told us what to expect: a lifetime of disability from those that are mentally ill, that it actually became so, and was written in all the new textbooks like an immutable fact of reality.In fact, 'Anatomy of an Epidemic' shows us how, to this day, you are more likely to heal and recover from manic depression or schizophrenia if you DON'T take the medication-for-life route. Because it is polypharmacy roulette that is actually leading to lifetime disability, not mental illness itself.Consider the stories we are told, that require some heavy-duty mental gymnastics, in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance we acquire, the longer we research these different drugs.For example, you've probably heard that ADHD meds are safe. If they weren't, who would dare put little children on them right? But what are ADD meds? They are stimulants, analogs of methamphetamine. It's revealed in their chemical names like dextroamphetamine--Adderall and methylphenadate--Ritalin.We are told that these drugs are safe if used as directed, that is, for symptoms of ADHD. But it's not safe for those without ADHD? Why is that? Is there something about the biochemistry of those with ADHD symptoms that somehow makes it safe?While we think about that, consider this. I have known a few intravenous speed users and crank heads in my time. I dated one for awhile many years ago. One thing she told me in passing was that tweakers that are hard up for a fix will happily settle for snorting ADHD meds. It's not entirely the same high, but close enough. Interestingly, if we GoAskAlice online and plug in the words 'snort Ritalin' we find a User generated question about the medical effects of inhaling ADHD stimulants.GoAskAlice says: They include rapid heartbeat, aggression, psychosis and many of the other side effects one would get from shooting speed, snorting crank and tweaking. Then AskAlice reminds the User that it's only a safe drug when used properly by ADHD patients.Which again makes us wonder, how is Adderall or Ritalin all that different from tweak? What is it about an ADHD kid that makes them immune to tweaker side effects and dependency? Answers: they aren't, and, nothing. They are taking speed just a like a doper on the street and the street doper will happily settle for grinding up and snorting those meds in a pinch because it quenches the dependency itch and gives them a buzz and the much touted super-concentration effect.Personal story. My own brother was diagnosed with ADD in the 80s and briefly medicated for it with Ritalin. Side effects included loss of appetite and inability to sleep. My brother started wasting away like a tweaker, grinding his teeth, not eating or sleeping and any tweaker will tell you that's part of the ride when you get hooked on meth.People on various drug forums will tell you that Adderall, Ritalin and other stims cause 'some kind of jaw touching, jaw grinding effect' that leaves their mouth tired and sore. Sounds like meth to me. I experienced grinding teeth and jaws when I tried speed a couple times myself.The rise of the ADHD epidemic and their methamphetimine analog treatments has created an entire generation of middle and upper class stim junkies who can't even tell they are junkies. Big Pharma is not complaining though. It reminds me of Sarah Goldfarb on ephedrine from the movie 'Requiem For a Dream'. "Ma, you're grinding your teeth like a doper," Harry tells her after she starts the weight-loss pills."They are just pills from my dahktah" she says. "He's a nice dahktah." And then my favorite part, Sarah says to her son, "How is it you know more about medicine than a dahktah?" Harry tells her, "Trust me mom, I know."Another great piece of consumer cognitive dissonance revolves around neurolepetics, the so-called 'antipsychotics'.Scientists did some studies a few years ago on the brains of macaques with a control group receiving a placebo and one group receiving Haldol and the other group receiving Zyprexa and not too surprisingly, six months later, the neuroleptic treated monkeys had brain damage. Pockets of interstitial fluid filled up spaces where healthy ganglion formerly existed.Antipsychotics aka neuroleptics aka 'nerve clamps', are pesticides. Most neuroleptics are analogs of phenothiazines. We have known for a long time that phenothiazines were used in textile dyes. And that it was sold as a pesticide by Dupont and is used as an antihelminthic or de-worming agent.If you want to know how a bug or worm feels when it is treated with a phenothiazine or piperazine derivative antipsychotic, go to youtube, look up videos on Tardive Dyskinesia and imagine experiencing that 1000 times worse. What do you think all the drooling, twitching, motor ataxia and shuffling gait is caused by? Are you going to tell me after hearing about people twitching and drooling uncontrollably and seeing TD in action in a video, that those people are not under the effects of or already harmed by, some kind of nervous system damaging agent?Consider this, deep inside the full data sheets on antipsychotics is a warning. "Do not let the liquid version of this drug come into contact with skin or clothing." But the data sheet never says why you shouldn't do that. Could it be that dropping liquid concentrate neurolepetics onto your skin or clothes will stain or tie-dye or otherwise cause color changes in the skin or fabric? Imagine that. A chemical used in dyes, converted into a medicine that can't come into contact with clothes because...?We would put it all together and realize it's not all that different from its textile and dye manufacturing cousin and not 'medicinal'. Certainly not in a healing sense. You ever smell liquid perphenazine? If you have ever worked with industrial chemicals and I have in blue-collar factory jobs--I've handled acids, acetones and I can tell you right now, if you take a deep whiff of a liquid antipsychotic it smells like a solvent. You will never forget it if you smell it like that, it's unique in its odor but totally something you might catch a whiff of in factories that work with metals, epoxies and etching chemicals.Read between the lies. What Big Pharma does, is dilute that industrial toxin and tweak the molecule around a little and sell it as a treatment for mental illness. That's all there is to it. And it's why it hurts you and makes your brain fog up and your mouth dry and your hands to shake and makes you tired. It's a very mild bug killer that you are playing Russian roulette with. If you get the chamber with the bullet, you come down with Tardive Dyskinesia, permanent central nervous system damage, to show for it.For me, perhaps the single most useful piece of ammunition in this book to use against your NAMI and NIMH indoctrinated friends, family and coworkers is this:The 'psych meds for mental illness is like insulin for a diabetic' analogy is the most closely held talking point for the pro-meds crowd and it is a lie. They have a mantra, "Insert X disease (ADHD, bipolar, OCD, schizophrenia) is a chemical imbalance that can be treated with drugs that address the specific imbalance."That mantra is provided by Big Pharma and is so thoroughly programmed into people, from senior citizens to junior high school kids, that you find, literally hundreds and thousands of people on the internet, on blogs, chatrooms, video comments and online news articles, all spreading this same lie every single day, 365 days a year, 'Mental illness is a chemical imbalance. It's like diabetes. You need meds to treat it."If psych meds are to psych patients like insulin is to a diabetic I should be as dead as a door nail now, because I had several 'comorbid' mental illnesses that 'should have been', but were never treated with psych meds during my early adult life.Furthermore, what Whitaker deftly shows us is the exact opposite of this mantra. That according to the research, people with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other thought or mood disorders do not have any kind of serotonin or dopamine imbalance whatsoever.That if you measure dopamine and serotonin metabolites in recently deceased people who presented with depression or schizophrenia, they had normal amounts of those neurotransmitters. If you did the same thing to people who had spent months, a few years or decades under the influence of psych meds before they died, their blood metabolites showed they very much had a drug imposed serotonin or dopamine imbalance.What actually happens to a person, when they start on an SSRI like Prozac or Zoloft, is that the drug scrambles normal serotonin function and the brain grows new serotonin receptors to compensate. Ditto for the dopamine D1 and D2 antagonists that comprise the neurolepetic drugs. When treated with so-called antipsychotics, a patient's brain begins to grow more dopamine receptors to compensate for all the dopamine antagonizing going on.This penchant the brain has, of actively trying to subvert the effects of psych meds by growing more receptors to achieve its normal balance has been documented. Whitaker makes mention of it as the brain's 'resistance to permanent adjustment' and how this was first observed by pharma scientists. It's partly why for some people, meds simply stop working after awhile and they feel compelled to try another drug formula that their brain has yet to adapt to.But not everyone's brain can subvert any psych med it encounters through this adaptation process. In fact, we hear about one guy who can never, ever come off of Klonopin because he suffers too much from the withdrawal. I personally know someone who took six years to come off an insane drug cocktail that was added or subtracted to for over twenty years. She is finally better and drug free, but is not yet physically well. Her body and mind has to completely adapt to the absence of a half dozen brain-changing chemicals that hurt her for far too long. The process is painful, but she is hopeful and so are those who support her.'Anatomy of an Epidemic' has many facts to learn and spread to others. * Fact: It is the drugs themselves that cause serotonin or dopamine imbalances. * Fact: You are more likely to really heal if you keep your use of these drugs to a minimum or not at all. * Fact: The longer you are on these drugs the more changes they make to your brain chemistry and neuronal firing. * Fact: As you add one drug after another after another, your likelihood of experiencing some pretty shocking, disabling and disastrous unpredictable drug interaction events becomes perilously certain.Bottom line: There is no chemical imbalance that causes depression and schizophrenia and by extension, their relatives like bipolar disorder. These ailments are not, repeat not caused by serotonin or dopamine imbalances and this book shows you why that is so. It is most certainly not true that you can never recover from schizophrenia. Or that once diagnosed, never undiagnosed, never healed, and that bipolar disorder or depression is doomed to haunt you forever.Meds are not like insulin for diabetics and mental illnesses are not chemical imbalances. Those ideas are marketing pitches that clever ad people wearing office professional clothing came up with, not in a lab, but in a cubicle of a glass-walled corporate building.When your teacher or parent or friend or psychiatrist tells you its a chemical imbalance, ask them, which chemicals? Insist that they tell you. If they won't or don't know, mention serotonin and dopamine, that should get them talking again. And then demand they explain how those two neurotransmitters are imbalanced. Then drop the bomb on them. Science has unequivocally proven that the drugs used to treat the conditions cause the very imbalance they claim to remedy.If they refuse to believe, show them, in chapter and page, this book and make them see and acknowledge it. Highlight the relevant sections with a fluorescent marker. Point at them with your finger. You may have to do that for everyone you meet until people finally get it into their heads that they are being programmed by advertising and government special interests groups.Tell them how it's not just serotonin or dopamine either. Every one of the 'anti' psych meds: antidepressants, antipsychotics, antianxiety, antiseizure, from Depakote and Neurontin to Prozac and Wellbutrin to Lorazapam or Seroquel, is exciting or inhibiting circuits in your body that maintain and govern its function that have been hardwired into it through the process of evolution. The body has some ability to self-correct from this, but if it's overwhelmed, overdosed, overmedicated, it stops doing that and becomes medically damaged in a process called 'iatrogenesis.' that can be permanent. Seriously, ask your doctor if Tardive Dyskinesia is right for your depression.If you think I spoiled the book with my review, consider this, I barely scratched the surface of its contents and the issues it exposes and could go on at length, easily for another ten thousands words. I didn't even go into the bipolar child thing. And how between Dmitri and Janice Papolos and Joe Biederman's Harvard Mafia they have pretty much created pediatric bipolar disorder out of thin air.Nor did I mention until now, that in 'Anatomy' we learn about sick Joe Biederman. A full professor who is 'next to God' who sits ensconced in the safety of the Harvard elite, performing mad experiments where he uses meth to induce tweaker episodes in kids, and if they get psychotic, it's a positive litmus test for childhood bipolar. Once that dx is made, the child is put on neurolepetics and moodstabilizers, as a matter of course, 'preventatively'.Biederman's whole mission seems to be to get young kids brains rewired on stims or bug killers or anti-seizure meds as soon as possible, for life. Don't even get me started on Biederman's 'A child can be bipolar from the moment it opens its eyes as a baby,' ideology. Why this modern-day Mengele has a medical license and is not behind bars I do not understand.Tl, dr version. Amazing book. Should be required reading before any social worker, psychologist or psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse gets their wings to start practicing.Buy this book. Read it. Get angry. Tell others. Then tell more. Reread it. Rinse and repeat. Even then you'll still get people who stubbornly insist on denial. You can put this book in front of someone's face but if they close their eyes, put their hands over their ears and shake their head and say "I'm not listening to you!" like Smeagol from 'Lord of the Rings' there's not a lot you can do.

I felt quite disturbed reading Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic about the rise of mental illness in America.His major premise appears to be that ingesting large amounts of anti-psychotics and antidepressants can give rise to cognition impairment. On the one hand I applaud him for raising the issue: Are our medications bad for us? But on another level I feel as if he may be just giving rise to anxiety in the mental health community for no good reason.Having ingested anti-psychotics namely Resperidone, for about three years and finding them really wonderful in terms of stopping the psychosis, I did feel a bit concerned about the potential for frontal lobe damage and loss of grey matter.However even I with my potentially impaired brain could pick up the howler which afflicts Whitaker's major premise. On page 6 in the chapter titled A Modern Plague he notes that in 1955 there were 566,000 people in state and county mental hospitals in the USA."However only 355,000 had a psychiatric diagnosis". He goes on to say that in 1987 this number had grown and there were 1.25 million people in the USA receiving a disability payment because of mental illness.He calculates this as an increase from 1 in every 468 Americans hospitalized by mental illness in 1955 to 1 in every 184 Americans on disability payments for mental health problems n 1987. Indeed if these figures are correct then there really is an epidemic.However a bare 45 pages later he notes :"During the war, (World War 11) psychiatrists had been charged with screening draftees for psychiatric problems and they had deemed 1.75 million American men mentally unfit for service. While many of the rejected draftees may have been feigning illness in order to avoid conscription, the numbers still told of a societal problem."There is only slightly more than a decade between the war years and 1955 when Whitaker notes there were only half a million people in state and county mental hospitals in the USA. If there were 1.75 million men rejected from military service during the war because of mental health problems isn't it more likely that in 1955 there was a huge number of people, both men and women, who didn't fess up to mental problems?This is the case today where comprehensive door knock studies have shown that some two thirds of people with mental health problems in Australia for example don't seek treatment.The fact that none of the experts and opinion makers who read this book including a critique from New Scientist, failed to point out this obvious problem causes me to wonder who is potentially cognitively impaired here? I can pick this inconsistency up and I have been on anti-psychotics, anti-depressants and lithium for many years whereas all these other non-medicated people haven't spotted the problem. I leave it up to the reader to make up their own mind.Another part of Whitaker's thesis which doesn't really hold water is when he argues that the increase in numbers on disability support is an indication that present medical treatments for mental illness are making us sicker.The increase in those on disability pensions can be due to a number of other environmental factors other than just medical treatments .The overall increase in numbers on disability pensions in Australia is really a function of the ageing population. In a May 2011 article in Inside Story, Peter Whiteford, Professor in Social Resarch Policy at the University of New South Wales points out that at least half of the vaunted "explosion" in disability pensioners in Australia is attributable to the gradual increase in ageing .Stressing that disability rates are strongly related to ageing, Professor Whiteford says that the steady increase in the disability pension rates that has so alarmed Australian politicians is significantly affected by the ageing of baby boomers."The first of the baby boomers started to turn fifty in 1996, so from that point changes in the age structure of the population became likely to increase levels of receipt of the DSP."This fits in with Whitaker's statement that "... during the 1990s people struggling with depression and bipolar illness began showing up on the SSI and SSDI rolls in ever increasing numbers ..."Professor Whitford goes on to say:"This means that about half of the total increase in numbers (on disability support pension) was the result of population ageing unrelated to any changes in the labour market, to the incidence of disability or to individual behavior."As persons with mental health problems comprise the largest sector of those on disabilities, some 25%, this sector will naturally increase with the baby boomer effect.Other reasons in Australia for the growth of the disability sector are the presence of people on the disability rolls who moved to the sector after other forms of support were closed. For example single mothers with mental health issues would move to the disability support pension when tougher entitlement conditions were applied to the Parenting Payment.While this is the situation in Australia, in order to prove his hypothesis Whitaker would have had to address some of these environmental factors in the USA to disregard them, and this he has not attempted to do.Leaving aside the questions of whether there is an epidemic or not Whitaker poses some important questions. Among these questions is the leading one; are our psychotropic medications hurting us? He provides some interesting research including that by Dr Martin Harrow.Harrow enrolled 64 young schizophrenics in a long term study. Some of this cohort were using medication anti-psychotics and others were not. Harrow published saying that "At the end of two years, the group not on antipsychotics were doing better on a "global assessment scale" than the group on the drugs."By the end of 4.5 years 39% of the off-medication group were "in recovery" and more than 60 % were working."In contrast, outcomes for the medication group worsened during the thirty month period. At the 4.5 year mark, only 6 percent were in recovery and few were working.At the 15 year follow-up, 40 % of those off drugs were in recovery, more than half were working, and only 28% suffered from psychotic symptoms. In contrast only 5% of those taking antipsychotics were in recovery, and 64% were actively psychotic.I can hear what you are thinking and in fact Dr Harrow said exactly that when interviewed by Whitaker about his study."Afterward I asked Dr Harrow why he thought the nonmedicated patients did so much better. He did not attribute it to their being off antipsychotics, but rather said it was because this group "had a stronger internal sense of self".Harrow said exactly what the average reader would think, that as it was a "free choice" experiment, those who did better initially went off the medication. In other words the less sick people ditched the medication leaving the "sicker" group on the medication and subsequently doing worse in the study. However Whitaker seems to not take this logical interpretation on board.He describes Dr Harrow as becoming "testy" when he pressed on with questions about whether there could be a different interpretation - that the antipsychotics were making the on-medication group sicker.Harrow rejected Whitaker's suggestion and said the data of his study proves that people who experience psychotic symptoms need not be on anti-psychotics all their lives. This is the take home message from this study for people who experience psychosis rather than that the anti-psychotics were making people sicker.Whitaker's book is still a must-read however and his passionate plea for less emphasis on drugs and more people centred therapies at the end of the book makes for great reading. His indictment of the treatment of children with psychotropic medication is also right on target. His mention of the fact that schizophrenia researcher and author of The Broken Brain, Nancy Andreasen has said that she has unpublished findings from MRI scans that the more drugs taken the bigger loss of brain tissue is indeed a wake up call."Another thing we've discovered is that the more drugs you've been given, the more brain tissue you lose." Andreasen said in an article in the New York Times in September 2008.She did clearly say this in an interview therefore I think we need a lot more research, preferably comparing the brain images of those who have been on anti-psychotics and the brain images of people with psychosis who have not been on any anti-psychotics at all in order to evaluate these findings.She says she has not released the data because she fears people may go off their medication. It is quite possible that Dr Andreasen has herself experienced a "quick rush of blood to the head" or cognitive impairment (I say this tongue in cheek as I was getting rather sick of Dr Andreasen and her concentration on "disease" and "cognitive impairment" in people with "schizophrenia") as she has not published her findings.Indeed her stated reason for not publishing her findings - that people might go off their medication - appears a trifle illogical as more people on psychiatric medication would read her interview in the New York Times than would find it in a scholarly journal.While Andraesen might have data that shows a trend towards greater loss of brain tissue with a longer time on medication the damage might be arising from the "disease" itself. Indeed Andraesen has previously argued ad nauseum that schizophrenia is a "disease" because of changes to the brain. To prove damage conclusively, and also to prove disease, she would need to compare brain scans of psychotic people on long term medication with those people on no medication at all.Unfortunately this type of research into whether anti-psychotics can hurt us would be research that Big Pharma would probably not undertake, therefore Governments need to step in and make sure this essential research is carried out.Consumers should really get together and push for a study on antipsychotics and loss of brain tissue. Perhaps those consumer/survivors with long term psychotic symptoms who don't take medication could volunteer for such a comparative study.As far as antidepressants and antipsychotic medications making us sicker, I think we are not being told enough about potential side effects. For example I took Effexor because essentially a side effect of the anti-psychotic was making me depressed. I did end up with an elevated blood pressure which was, unknown to me, a potential side effect of Effexor for some people. At no stage was I ever told about potential side effects of these medications by any medical practitioner.Whitaker covers these issues very well with some illuminating case histories and also a comprehensive history of the development of the major psychotropic drugs.Robert Whitaker's book is available on Amazon for the very low price of $10.However the sections on alternative treatment methods is really interesting. I thought it was well worth the money.

This book is the most powerful book ever written about psychiatry, lifting the lid on how they operate and how they medicate people that have what is deemed mental, mind disorders, when really what's happened to people is what creates distress. I loved this book and think it should be read by parents before they allow any doctor or psychiatrist to diagnose their son or daughter or any family member for that matter. Robert is online and has many videos to watch and much to teach us. Hard reading for anyone on medications and stuck feeling disempowered. Great read.

If you or someone you care about are taking antidepressant drugs you really REALLY should read this book. The book analyses the reasons why there has been an enormous increase in long term disability from mental illness in the USA in the last 30 years, despite the advent of psychoactive drugs which are supposed to cure the 'chemical imbalances in the brain' underlying depression and psychosis.What is so powerful is that the tone of the book is dispassionate; the author does not lecture, but simply lets the actual published research data tell the story; and the story is a shocking one. He provides overwhelming evidence that antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, although they may help in the short term, do serious and sometimes irreversible harm in the long term. For example, long-term use of antipsychotic drugs causes shrinkage and atrophy of the frontal lobes in man, leading to severe cognitive impairment. This is not seen in unmedicated patients or patients who have only taken the drugs for a short time. This evidence of severe long-term damage is actively hidden from the general public by the pharmaceutical companies, who have made billions of pounds profit from these drugs and wish these profits to continue. Of all the disturbing facts discussed in the book, perhaps the most concerning is the rise in psychoactive medication of children.In Europe psychiatrists are becoming aware of the long-term damage done by psychoactive drugs, and it is encouraging that in the uk, Finland and other countries forms of non-drug therapy are being successfully applied. However in the USA the grip of the psychiatric establishment and the profit motive is so strong that non-drug therapies have been suppressed or dismissed as ineffective. I wish that a copy of this book could be given to every medical student contemplating a psychiatric speciality; it seems that only by educating the new young doctors will the prescribing of these dangerous drugs be curtailed.

A compelling, easily readable and easily understood scientific, evidenced based exploration of the "benefit - harms" balance of drug use in "mainstream psychiatry". Drug toxicities are validated and analysed in individuals, and their families, as well as in terms of adverse outcomes over short, intermediate and (especially) long term in human populations. It is very painful to read for anyone who has witnessed the cumulative toxicity of medications which may be enforced despite dubious benefit. This book does not condemn the use of psychotropic drugs. On the contrary, it is a powerful advocacy for judicious and compassionate use of limited duration ( where appropriate ) of Pscho-tropic medication. It does however powerfully demonstrate Pharma "marketing masquerading as medicine". It is of particular relevance for G.P.'s /Family Physicians and for any potential patient who is given the label of "chemical imbalance".The underlying, implied appeal is - "first do no harm."

A well researched and put together book that reads well. It is basically the story of the collusion of the American psychiatric establishment with the drug companies in order to benefit each other. The psychiatrists got kudos and money and the drug companies got - money.It explores what this might mean for anyone taking the drugs and details how they may be the cause of the explosion of psychiatric cases in the USA. Sadly the UK is following along.Mandatory reading of anyone who prescribes or takes these drugs.

This is one of the best books I have read on the subject. Utterly compelling and a fast paced read too. What a special time read!