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69ea5d1
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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? (p. 30)
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mental-illness
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Robert Whitaker |
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119da2f
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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. (176)
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Robert Whitaker |
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9db6e06
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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 (203)
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Robert Whitaker |
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d050989
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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 be on disability forever, and I have started to question whether depression is really a chemical thing. What are the origins of my despair? How can I really help myself? I want to honor the other parts of me, other than the sick part that I'm..
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Robert Whitaker |
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e7052a9
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Rather than fix chemical imbalances in the brain, the drugs creat them. (207)
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Robert Whitaker |
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db16edd
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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."
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Robert Whitaker |
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4bbe77e
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We have been focusing on the role that psychiatry and its medications may be playing in this epidemic, and the evidence is quite clear. First, by greatly expanding diagnostic boundaries, psychiatry is inviting and ever-greater number of children and adults into the mental illness camp. Second, those so diagnosed are then treated with psychiatric medications that increase the likelihood they will become chronically ill. Many treated with psy..
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Robert Whitaker |
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61b3a68
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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. (123)"
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Robert Whitaker |
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c7ed4ea
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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 adulthood with a "serious mental illness." That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug-based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and alr..
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Robert Whitaker |
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79992cd
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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." (341)"
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Robert Whitaker |
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29038c2
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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.
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Robert Whitaker |
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933f894
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Prior to being medicated, a depressed person has no known chemical imbalance. (81)
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Robert Whitaker |
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15a7f67
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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)
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parents
mental-illness
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Robert Whitaker |
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8842e5f
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The cocktail she took usually included a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, and a benzodiazepine for anxiety, although the exact combination was always changing. One drug would make her sleepy, another would give her tremors, and none of the cocktails seemed to bring her emotional tranquility. Then, in 2001, she was put on an anti-psychotic, Zyprexa, which, in a sense, worked like a charm. "You know what?" she says today, amazed by what sh..
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Robert Whitaker |
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d04adb3
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and she no longer is having her emotional responses to...stress numbed by medication. "I've been off the drugs for two years, and sometimes I find it very, very difficult to deal with my emotions. I tend to have these rages of anger. Did the drugs bring such a cloud over my mind, make me so comatose, that I never gained skills on how to deal with my emotions? Now I'm finding myself getting angrier than ever and getting happier than ever too..
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Robert Whitaker |
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6d9ccdc
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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." (349)"
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Robert Whitaker |
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5e742d0
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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 the MindFreedom hunger strike revealed--it can't direct us to any scientific studies that document this claim. It told us that psychiatric medications fix chemical imbalances in the brain, even though decades of research failed to find this to ..
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Robert Whitaker |
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b2d7868
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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 role model for that. They could have helped me with my eating problems, and my diet and exercise, and helped me learn how to take care of myself. Instead, it was you have this problem with your neurotransmitters, and so here, take this pill Zol..
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Robert Whitaker |
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795fedf
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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 (282)
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Robert Whitaker |
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ef4da75
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In 1967, one in three American adults filled a prescription for a "psychoactive" medication, with total sales of such drugs reaching $692 million."
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Robert Whitaker |
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07d5f82
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The GAO, in its June 2008 report, concluded that one in every sixteen young adults in the United States is now "seriously mentally ill." --
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Robert Whitaker |
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be44a4a
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The "cure," it seemed, had once again been proven to be "worse than the disease."
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Robert Whitaker |
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e1a4753
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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 gone through their psychotic episodes without having their feelings numbed by the drugs. Medicated patients didn't have that same learning experience, and as a result Carpenter and McGlashan concluded, over the long term they "are less able t..
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Robert Whitaker |
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0718dd8
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We must realize that mental problems are just as real as physical disease, and that anxiety and depression require active therapy as much as appendicitis or pneumonia," wrote Dr. Howard Rusk, a professor at New York University who penned a weekly column for the New York Times. "They are all medical problems requiring medical care."12"
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Robert Whitaker |
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06ca6dc
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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"
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Robert Whitaker |
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9ac9fcc
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Wallace Laboratories hired Salvador Dali 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.
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Robert Whitaker |
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743fa36
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The evaluation of the merits of medical treatments for madness has always been a calculation made by doctors and, to a certain extent, by society as a whole. Does the treatment provide a method for managing disturbed people? That is the usual bottom line. The patient's subjective response to the treatment--does it help the patient feel better or think more clearly?--simply doesn't count in that evaluation. The "mad," in fact, are dismissed ..
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Robert Whitaker |
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1c4f451
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The number of episodes, and it's a very rich literature [documenting this], is associated with more cognitive deficits," he said. "We are building more episodes, more treatment resistance, more cognitive dysfunction, and there is data showing that if you have four depressive episodes, unipolar or bipolar, it doubles your late-life risk of dementia. And guess what? That isn't even the half of it.... In the United States, people with depressi..
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Robert Whitaker |
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f57aef7
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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..
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Robert Whitaker |
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b78bd28
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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 or some other illegal drug prior to their first manic or psychotic episode.10 This substance abuse, the University of Cincinnati investigators concluded, may "initiate progressively more severe affective responses, culminating in manic or depr..
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Robert Whitaker |
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32ee953
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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.
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Robert Whitaker |
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7d1e702
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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.
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Robert Whitaker |
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2688128
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The history of psychiatry and its treatments can be a contentious issue in our society, so much so that when you write about it, as I did in an earlier book, Mad in America, people regularly ask about how you became interested in the subject. The assumption is that you must have a personal reason for being curious about this topic, as otherwise you would want to stay away from what can be such a political minefield. In addition, the person ..
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Robert Whitaker |
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b7b2b1f
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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 Street," one writer observed.19 Now that physicians controlled access to antibiotics and all other prescription drugs, their incomes began to climb rapidly, doubling from 1950 to 1970 (after adjusting for inflation). The AMA's revenues from dr..
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Robert Whitaker |
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439e152
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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"
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Robert Whitaker |
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49226e8
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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 fifty years. We should also expect that the number of disabled mentally ill, on a per-capita basis, would have declined since the arrival in 1988 of Prozac and the other second-generation psychiatric drugs. We should see a two-step drop in disabi..
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Robert Whitaker |
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aac9152
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If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us." --ADLAI STEVENSON (1952)"
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Robert Whitaker |
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0c72029
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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 op-ed published in the New York Times, Alan Sroufe, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development, told of this bottom-line finding: "To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-def..
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Robert Whitaker |