Review of Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
-----Original Message-----
From: Vince Boehm <vince_19805@yahoo.com>
To: undisclosed-recipients: ;
Sent: Mon, Apr 5, 2010 6:19 pm
Subject: Whitaker [my review] Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets,
Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
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I've just finished reading Robert Whitaker's new book, and here is a
rough draft of my review.
His new book is due out on April 13. Bob is a journalist and a one of
my favorite people. His Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets,
Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in
America is now available for preorder.
Whitaker was a medical writer at the Albany Times Union newspaper, in
Albany, N.Y., from 1989 to 1994. In 1992, he was a Knight Science
Journalism fellow at MIT. Following that he became director of
publications at Harvard Medical School. In 1994 he co-founded a
publishing company, CenterWatch, that covered the pharmaceutical
clinical trials industry. CenterWatch was acquired by Medical
Economics, a division of The Thomson Corporation, in 1998. His
articles on psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry have won a
George Polk Award for Medical Writing. and a National Association of
Science Writers' Award for best magazine article. In 1998, he co-wrote
a series on abuses in psychiatric research that was a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.
In his preface to Mad In America, Whitaker writes, "Why should living
in a country with rich resources, and with advanced medical treatments
for disorders of every kind, be so toxic to those who are severely
mentally ill?" This is not a rhetorical question, but one that demands
an answer.
And straight answers to relatively basic questions of this type are
hard to come by in the netherworld that biopsychiatry has become.
Visit his new Psychology Today-based blog
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My review :
I have often wondered how history will treat the era of
biopsychiatry.
Robert Whitaker is a medical journalist and a superb historian.
This is a book for the grownups. If there are those of you around
around who are that still beguiled by "chemical imbalances", "magic
bullets", psychobabble, and the other rhetoric that has dominated the
public face of the mental health debate for the almost forty years that
this paradigm has prevailed, please see me after class.
I do not want to alarm the other children*.
The contrast between the public message the proponents of biopsychiatry
told the public and the realities its insiders kept secret is
startling. This book could be subtitled "Everything You Ever Wanted To
Know About Biopsychiatry, But Were Afraid To Ask".
Whitaker has written a brilliant demythology of this chaotic period.
Whitaker outlines this era and and its belief system. He presents
concise answers to the "who", the "what". the "where", and the "when"
of this fiasco. He takes no prisoners, not even the pharma-funded
parent-driven "grassroots" nonprofit organizations. This book
explores each and every detail of this fabric of deception using the
words of its proponents, then confronts each of these with the brutal
truth. He then offers "reality checks" in the form of real time
stories of the true victims of this folly as the story unfolds.
So we have a pack of lies. Let us look at these lies.
The Big Lie, of course is "Treatment Works". It
doesn't, of course. It just makes things worse. Much worse.
The lives shortened by 25 to 30 years, and the massive
treatment-caused health problems; diabetes, heart disease, and other
physical damage associated with psychiatric drugs is just part of the
story. .The other factors that enter into this obscene equation are
making life long mental patients out of children going through the
"terrible twos" and others experiencing what in years past were
considered a temporary normal life crisis. Add to this the
treatment-caused cognitive deficits, the drug induced violence and
suicide, and the entire lives destroyed in real terms of shattered life
goals and other quality-of-life issues, and one can partially grasp
this litany of horrors.
The horror deepens when you realize the exact opposite of this story
was presented to the public. We do not look at outcomes! While short
term carefully manipulated short term trails are heralded as
life-saving wonders of modern science until the patents run out, the
grim long term outcomes are totally ignored, either by blaming the
patient or some mysterious outcome of an equally mysterious "illness"
that has been studied for more than 100 years without determining its
cause.
Early death is dismissed as a 'side effect'. NEVER is the product
involved questioned.
Given the involvement of the federal government documented in
Whitaker's book and the outrageous activities of the many other parties
involved, this has all the elements of a perfect crime perpetrated by
multiple racketeering influenced corrupt organizations.
The increase in U.S. Social Security Disability payments is astounding
and the system is being manipulated.
Within the next 24 hours, the SSDI and SSI rolls will add 850 adults
and 250 "mentally ill" children to the four million already getting
"crazy checks". The extreme example of this outrageous manipulation is
the murder conviction of Rebecca Rileys parents in an attempt to get
these checks. The court found they destroyed their beautiful 4 year
old daughter(left) through willful massive over medication. This
couple are now serving life sentences in Massachusetts prisons. I
clearly believe these payments are necessary and proper for the
genuinely disabled, but the sheer volume of these approvals leads one
to be extremely skeptical of this process. But, if the system is being
gamed by people like the Rileys.
What is happening here is we are dooming a very large portion of these
children and adults to a lifetime of misery.
Throughout the entire book, Whitaker demolishes cherished myths,
explodes faulty hypotheses, rats out the bad guys at all levels, and
corrects the ideological mess that has caused incalculable damage to
its victims. Finally, Whitaker devotes an entire section of his book to
solutions.
His first order of business is TO TELL THE TRUTH.
"ITS THE LIES THAT BOTHER ME". I wrote these words at the
MindFreedom hunger strike in 2003.
Myself and five other psychiatric survivors gathered together in a
church building in Pasadena (right, I'm the old guy in the foreground
with his hands on his hips) in the fall of 2003 and entered into a pact
to not eat solid food until the American Psychiatric Association, NAMI,
and the U.S. Surgeon General offered straight answers to the following
simple questions. There were about 40 other sympathy strikers who
joined us world wide.
WE ASK THAT YOU PRODUCE scientifically-valid evidence for the
following, or you publicly admit to media, government officials and the
general public that you are unable to do so:
EVIDENCE THAT CLEARLY ESTABLISHES the validity of"schizophrenia,"
"depression" or other "major mental illnesses" as biologically-based
brain diseases.
EVIDENCE FOR A PHYSICAL DIAGNOSTIC EXAM -- such as a scan or test of
the brain, blood, urine, genes, etc. -- that can reliably distinguish
individuals with these diagnoses (prior to treatment with psychiatric
drugs), from individuals without these diagnoses.
EVIDENCE FOR A BASE-LINE STANDARD of a neurochemically-balanced
"normal" personality, against which a neurochemical "imbalance" can be
measured and corrected by pharmaceutical means.
EVIDENCE THAT ANY PSYCHOTROPIC DRUG can correct a "chemical imbalance"
attributed to a psychiatric diagnosis, and is anything more than a
non-specific alterer of brain physiology.
EVIDENCE THAT ANY PSYCHOTROPIC DRUG can reliably decrease the
likelihood of violence or suicide.
EVIDENCE THAT PSYCHOTROPIC DRUGS do not in fact increase the overall
likelihood of violence and suicide.
FINALLY, that you reveal publicly evidence published in mainstream
medical journals, but unreported in mainstream media, that links use of
some psychiatric drugs to structural brain changes.
All we asked for was the truth.
Hey, just level with us. We are all adults. We can take it.
The strike lasted 21 days. The straight answers to those simple and
fair questions never came.
We need a major rethink of the system. We can jump start the process
of reforming the mental health system.
Whitaker's first step of this process is quite simple.
JUST TELL THE TRUTH.
Vince
* A note to the 'children' among us: I really don't know how to tell
you this, but I have dreadful news about your Wonderful Little Friend
who leaves money under your pillow when you lose a tooth. See me after
class.
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