Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment Of the Mentally Ill [Paperback]

Whitaker spends the first half of the book relating the earlier history of dehumanizing psychiatric treatments in gruesome detail. He starts with the 18th and 19th centuries, when patients were nearly drowned, spun in chairs to the point of collapse, or had their teeth or intestines removed. He continues through the first half of the 20th century, when the American eugenics movement motivated the sterilization of tens of thousands and inspired Hitler, neurologist Walter Freeman drove around the country with ice picks giving lobotomies through eye sockets, and shock therapies caused convulsions so severe that teeth, jaws, and even spines were often fractured.

While the history of psychiatry, at least until 1950, is known to some, telling it lays the groundwork for Whitaker's thesis: that nothing has changed except the technology. The science it still bad, the treatment still abusive, the lying to the public and patients still egregious. Based in part on his own research, Whitaker documents the dark facts behind the past 50 years of treating patients with what are supposed to be antipsychotic medications- known in the profession as neuroleptics-from Thorazine to Clozaril and beyond.

He makes the case that these drugs are often no more than chemical lobotomies. He debunks the myth that neuroleptics normalize brain chemistry, because no chemical imbalance is known to cause schizophrenia; instead they damage brain chemistry. While he acknowledges that some patients find them relieving, they cause many to feel like zombies or worse-these drugs were used by the Soviet Union to torture dissidents. They can exacerbate symptoms, make relapses more likely and more severe, and can trigger violence. They can cause a chronic psychiatric condition when recovery is otherwise possible, disabling and sometimes permanent neurological side effects, and death. In order to test pet theories, psychiatrists have experimented on unsuspecting and deliberately misled patients by making their psychoses much worse. Drug companies have conspired with doctors to cover up risks and incompetent research. The World Health Organization has shown that you stand a far better chance of recovering from schizophrenia in a developing country like Nigeria or India, where neuroleptics are rarely given, than in America or Europe.

This book is a painful reminder that psychiatrists don't have a special handle on psychological problems, and their hubris can come at great cost to others.

If the books of Whitaker and others are as dangerous and misleading as biopsychiatry claims, one would think they'd be eager to rebut them fact for fact. But they do not. Professionals and the public need to demand an end to the evasion.