Quotes from Robert Whitaker

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 in America by Robert Whitaker; and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat.

But none of these drugs had been developed after scientists had identified any disease process or brain abnormality that might have been causing these symptoms.

When it comes to dead bodies in current psychotropic trials, there are a greater number of them in the active treatment groups than in the placebo groups. This is quite different from what happens in penicillin trials or trials of drugs that really work." —DAVID HEALY, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AT CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, WALES (2008)1

Psychiatry's thought leaders shaped our society's understanding of mental disorders, and once they began serving as paid speakers, the pharmaceutical companies sent money their way through multiple channels.

SSRIs also cause a multitude of troubling side effects. These include sexual dysfunction, suppression of REM sleep, muscle tics, fatigue, emotional blunting, and apathy. In addition, investigators have reported that long-term use is associated with memory impairment, problem-solving difficulties, loss of creativity, and learning deficiencies.

Anti psychotics—a class of drugs previously seen as extremely problematic in kind, useful only in severely ill patients—were the top revenue-producing class of drugs in 2008, ahead even of the cholesterol-lowering agents.12 Total sales of all psychotropic drugs in 2008 topped $40 billion.

When it comes to dead bodies in current psychotropic trials, there are a greater number of them in the active treatment groups than in the placebo groups. This is quite different from what happens in penicillin trials or trials of drugs that really work." —DAVID HEALY, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AT CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, WALES (2008)

Now, once a business gets a customer into its store, it wants to keep that customer and get that customer to buy multiple products, and that's when the psychiatric "drug trap" kicks in.

There is a story that psychiatry doesn't dare tell, which shows that our societal delusion about the benefits of psychiatric drugs isn't entirely an innocent one. In order to sell our society on the soundness of this form of care, psychiatry has had to grossly exaggerate the value of its new drugs, silence critics, and keep the story of poor long-term outcomes hidden.

American psychiatry has told the public a false story over the past thirty years.

In 1967, one in three American adults filled a prescription for a "psychoactive" medication, with total sales of such drugs reaching $692 million.42

Thus, in 1955, 1 in every 468 Americans was hospitalized due to a mental illness. In 1987, there were 1.25 million people receiving an SSI or SSDI payment because they were disabled by mental illness, or 1 in every 184 Americans.

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us." —ADLAI STEVENSON (1952)

An epidemic had come of age, and history reveals that it rose in lockstep with the prescribing of stimulants and antidepressants to children.

Sometimes I thought I would die and other times wished I had."11 Although the FDA held a hearing on the matter, it did not impose any legal control on benzodiazepines similar to what had been placed on amphetamines and barbiturates, and so the public's belief that the drugs were relatively nonaddictive and harmless survived until 1975, when the U.S. Justice Department demanded that they be classified as schedule IV drugs

The theories that patients with depression lack serotonin and that patients with schizophrenia have too much dopamine have long been refuted. The truth is just the opposite. There is no chemical imbalance to begin with, but when treating mental illness with drugs, we create a chemical imbalance.

The New York Age denounced the white man as "the most damnable hypocrite, scoundrel and savage that the world has ever seen.

As early as 1992, when the prescribing of SSRIs to children was just getting started, University of Pittsburgh researchers reported that 23 percent of boys eight to nineteen years old treated with Prozac developed mania or maniclike symptoms, and another 19 percent developed "drug-induced" hostility.

The prescribing of psychotropic drugs to two-year-olds and three-year-olds began to become more commonplace about a decade ago, and sure enough, the number of severely mentally ill children under six years of age receiving SSI has tripled since then, rising from 22,453 in 2000 to 65,928 in 2007.

Should they remain on the drugs for years, they are at high risk of becoming chronically depressed. They may also develop—as the American Psychiatric Association warns in one of its textbooks—an "apathy syndrome," which "is characterized by a loss of motivation, increased passivity, and often feelings of lethargy and 'flatness.

Yet, fueled by pharmaceutical advertisements, the belief lived on, and it caused Irish psychiatrist David Healy, who has written a number of books on the history of psychiatry, to quip in 2005 that this theory needed to be put into the medical dustbin, where other such discredited theories can be found. "The serotonin theory of depression," he wrote, with evident exasperation, "is comparable to the masturbatory theory of insanity.

In 1972, Samuel Guze and Eli Robins at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis reviewed the scientific literature and determined that in follow-up studies that lasted ten years, 50 percent of people hospitalized for depression had no recurrence of their illness. Only a small minority of those with unipolar depression—one in ten—became chronically ill, Guze and Robins concluded.

Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known "chemical imbalance." However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.

To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships, or behavior problems, the very things we want to improve…. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.