Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill

Psychiatry Under the Influence is the product of the authors’ work during their 1-year fellowship at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics. Applying a template used in the study of political corruption, the authors provide a thorough case study analysis of ‘‘organized psychiatry’’ under the influence of powerful pharmaceutical industry manipulation and the protection of guild interests orchestrated by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The APA obtained substantial help from groups of pharma-supported researchers spinning questionable interpretations of findings primarily from drug outcome studies to nurture an impression of a genuine medical discipline reborn on neuroscience foundations. Whitaker and Cosgrove document the timing and significance of interrelated events on the emergence of a profession eager for a respectable seat at the table with its disease-based medical colleagues. Reasonable prescriptions for reform are embedded in a refreshingly positive philosophical view of mankind. Key psychopharmacological treatment studies of important diagnostic groups are meticulously dissected revealing a 35-year history of outcome research communicated to the medical professions and society generally through clever but deceptive marketing rather than sound research dissemination. The reader naı̈ve to the extent of this problem will likely be shocked into an utter state of disbelief from the revelations about psychopharmacological research tactics across the time period and the connections of those efforts to the evolution of the DSM. With a few well-founded exceptions, Whitaker and Cosgrove have not made this book about specific people but, rather, they have presented a scholarly employment of ‘‘cognitive dissonance’’ and ‘‘implicit bias’’ to explain why an insecure medical discipline would promote an image of safe and effective treatment in the absence of scientific support for either. Their focus is on the institution of psychiatry and they are careful not to individualize the attack stating, ‘‘Whereas individual quid pro quo corruption assumes that there is a ‘bad apple’ problem, the framework of institutional corruption seeks to understand whether there is a ‘bad barrel’ problem.’’ Psychiatry being ‘‘in charge’’ of the mental health treatment enterprise is questioned for both the harm this approach has done to countless uninformed or misinformed patients but also for the morose philosophy of humanness by which the approach has poisoned the American public’s view of human struggle forced into the framework of ‘‘disease’’ for which drugs are employed as the ‘‘cure.’’ Whitaker is a science journalist and an established author. His most recent previous book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, revealed the influence of diagnostic inflation of mental illness on swelling SSDI roles and won him a best ‘‘Investigative Reporters and Editors’’ book award for investigative journalism in 2010 and he has numerous accolades as an author including a Pulitzer nomination. He was recently dubbed a ‘‘menace to society’’ by Jeffrey Lieberman, recent past-president of the APA, and that was before this book was even released. Tentatively ruling out the well-known defense mechanism of projection, by ‘‘society,’’ Lieberman must have been referring to his professional ‘‘society,’’ one would have to believe. Whitaker’s co-author, Lisa Cosgrove, is a clinical psychologist with impeccable credentials as an ethicist and professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. & Fred Ernst fernst@utpa.edu

Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform

Toxic Psychiatry is written by a psychiatrist who was a consultant for the NIMH before going into full-time private practice. He is now the director of the Centre for the Study of Psychiatry and Professor (Adjunct) of Conifict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. This book ought to be a timely reminder that psy chiatry is indeed becoming overwhelmingly biological in its perspective and that eclecticism is preferential to the individualistic and devisive posturings of the biological, psychosocial or psychodynamic schools of thought and practice. It does not achieve this and instead adopts its own posture which is hostile to current clinical psychiatry as practiced throughout the world. This is not a scholarly book but one which resorts to hyperbole and cant to argue the position. Sweeping statements such as â€œ¿ shock treatment is on the rise and elderly women are being targetedâ€•abound and show the author's paranoid position. Indeed, so entrenched is he in this position that he launches an attack on what he terms the â€ ̃¿ psychopharmaceutical complex', nor does he shrink from naming the individual companies and their drugs. He holds particular disdain for those whom he terms the â€ ̃¿ Xanax doctors', the â€ ̃¿ toxic parents' who have joined â€ ̃¿ toxic psychiatry', the APA and those who con duct genetic studies. Indeed, he notices a trend in which â€œ¿ the biopsychiatrists of late are becoming more boldâ€• and again citing â€œ¿ Kallmand even the Nazi Rudinâ€•. He also rants against antidepressants which â€œ¿ probably have no specific antidepressant effectâ€•, against â€ ̃¿ learning disorder' which â€œ¿ is a diagnosis generated not by re search or even by clinical experience, but by a parents movementâ€•, and against any theory or investigation which adopts a different perspective from his, including genetic studies in manicâ€”depression, computerised tomographic scan information in schizophrenia, and even the current approach to eating disorders. What then is his perspective? He claims that it is a psychosocial one and retreats to the simplistic position that psychiatric disorders are caused variously by psychospiritual problems, by the family, or by society. He even disputes the illness status ofschizophrenia and manicâ€”depression.Ofcourse, nowhere does he present a critique of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Singled out for hagiography are feminists such as Betty Freidan and Kate Millett and headvocatesa feminist perspective of psychiatry claiming that â€œ¿ women are abused and humiliated in psychiatry as they are in any other power structureâ€•. This of course is the nub of his argument: that main-stream psychiatry is setting itself up as another powerfulinstitution with its own survival as the rationale. To achieve this, psychiatrists are taught to be aloof and authoritarian and he admonishes his own trainers for ever failing to have a serious discussion about caring, compassion or love. That this screed is so badly written, so simplistic, and so vitriolic is a pity, for psychiatry in the l990s needs healthydebate ifit is not to become fossilised.

Toxic Psychiatry, Drugs and Electroconvulsive Therapy: The Truth and the Better Alternatives. By Peter Breggin. London: Harper Collins. 1993. 578 pp. £7.99.

The Simple Science of Sanity, Certainty, & Peace-of-Mind—Empowering ‘Intent’ Detoxifies Psychosis

The Scientific Basis for Democracy, Peace, Enemies and War—Without ‘Intent’, We’re Fossils

NEWTON’s laws of motion predicted that light would travel faster from a moving source—it doesn’t. Einstein was convinced that unruly electrons had no place in an orderly, understandable universe. Both assumed that human knowledge could be perfected, mathematically, and that a coherent scientific account of the world we find ourselves in, not only exists, but is available and open to dedicated human enquiry. This paper argues that Hume, Kant and recent work on Hubble’s Constant render this idealistic position untenable. The remedy proposed is not to tighten scientific definitions ever further, but to reposition Science so as to prioritise the biosphere. This entails placing the process of living organisms centre stage, since they defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics, thereby reducing Uncertainty for all—an approach best exemplified in clinical medicine, where despite unbridgeable gaps in medical knowledge, healing can and does take place. Using Quaker insights developed in the 1650s, a non-theological pathway is offered which emphasises human creativity and social cohesion. Unhappily psychiatry today, under the guise of being 100% scientific in the Einstein way, discards three counts of millennial medical wisdom, with catastrophic consequences, as shown by scientifically valid data. A healthier approach to mental and social health, emphasising trust and consent, is described.

Bob Johnson

Papers

Why Quakerism Is More Scientific Than Einstein

The Scientific Evidence That Today’s Psychiatry Cripples Itself—By Excluding ‘Intent’

The Simple Science of Sanity, Certainty, & Peace-of-Mind—Empowering ‘Intent’ Detoxifies Psychosis

The Scientific Basis for Democracy, Peace, Enemies and War—Without ‘Intent’, We’re Fossils

The Simple Science of Democracy and of Money—Without Consent, We’re Extinct