Quotes from Robert Whitaker

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, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden teenager into a lifelong mental patient?

In the United States, people with depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia are losing twelve to twenty years in life expectancy compared to people not in the mental health system.

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. - Amy Upham

Rather than fix chemical imbalances in the brain, the drugs creat them.

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, 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.

Recovery on the med model requires you to be obedient, like a child," she explains. "You are obedient to your doctors, you are compliant with your therapist, and you take your meds. There's no striving toward greater intellectual concerns.

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 bad condition visible. He or she 'wears the symptoms' and has the burden to carry them.

Klonopin ruined my lie. It takes away your drive, and in the morning, you don't want to get out of bed, because you feel so groggy. I don't even know what it's like to feel normal. This is my world. Things don't get me as excited as most people because I'm in a constant state of sedation. It should never have been prescribed for long-term use.

Prior to being medicated, a depressed person has no known chemical imbalance.

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)

The "cure," it seemed, had once again been proven to be "worse than the disease.

That experience allowed me to see this therapeutic principle in action," Stanton said. "You just can't organize yourself without a connection to another human being, and you can't make that connection if you embalm yourself with drugs.

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

The GAO, in its June 2008 report, concluded that one in every sixteen young adults in the United States is now "seriously mentally ill.

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

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.

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 this astonishing increase in its prevalence.9 Although the quick-and-easy explanation is that psychiatry has greatly expanded the diagnostic boundaries, that is only part of the story. Psychotropic drugs—both legal and illegal—have helped fuel the bipolar boom.

Twenty-four percent of the patients treated with Saint-John's-wort had a "full response," 25 percent of the Zoloft patients, and 32 percent of the placebo group. "This study fails to support the efficacy of H perforatum in moderately severe depression," the investigators concluded, glossing over the fact that their drug had failed this test too.29