All I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)
With psychiatric medications, you solve one problem for a period of time, but the next thing you know you end up with two problems. The treatment turns a period of crisis into a chronic mental illness...
The three books were The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness i...
The off-drug patients also suffered less from depression, blunted emotions, and retarded movements. Indeed, they told Carpenter and McGlashan that they had found it gratifying and informative to have...
The GAO, in its June 2008 report, concluded that one in every sixteen young adults in the United States is now seriously mentally ill.
If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications...
The prescribing of stimulants to ADHD youth began to take off in the 1980s, and today, thirty years later, studies have failed to show that this treatment helps children grow up and thrive. In a 2012...
But here is the conundrum. Given this great advance in care, we should expect that the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States, on a per-capita basis, would have declined over the past fi...
Today, according to the NIMH, bipolar illness affects one in every forty adults in the United States, and so, before we review the outcomes literature for this disorder, we need to try to understand t...
This new marketplace for drugs proved profitable for all involved. Drug industry revenues topped $1 billion in 1957, the pharmaceutical companies enjoying earnings that made them the darlings of Wall...
Psychosis does not live in the head. It lives in the in-between of family members, and in the in-between of people, Salo explained. It is in the relationship, and the one who is psychotic makes the ba...
In 1967, one in three American adults filled a prescription for a psychoactive medication, with total sales of such drugs reaching $692 million.
Prior to being medicated, a depressed person has no known chemical imbalance. (81)
In studies of first-episode bipolar patients, investigators at McLean Hospital, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Cincinnati Hospital found that at least one-third had used marijuana...
I have always been told that a person has to accept that the illness is chronic, she says, at the end of our interview. You can be 'in recovery,' but you can never be 'recovered.' But I don't want to...
I do wonder what might have happened if [at age sixteen] I could have just talked to someone, and they could have helped me learn about what I could do on my own to be a healthy person. I never had a...
For the past twenty-five years, the psychiatric establishment has told us a false story. It told us that schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar illness are known to be brain diseases, even though—as t...
And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known chemical imbalance. However,...
Wallace Laboratories hired Salvador Dalí to help stoke Miltown fever, paying the great artist $35,000 to create an exhibit at an AMA convention that was meant to capture the magic of this new drug.
That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adu...