Mad in America

History, Science, and the Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders

by Robert Whitaker

The Real Suicide Data from the TADS Study Comes to Light

Recently, Robert Gibbons published a paper in which he claimed, based on his "reanalysis" of the data from studies of fluoxetine in youth, that "treatment with fluoxetine was not found to be related to suicide risk when compared with placebo." David Healy responded, with a reference to new data from the NIMH's Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS). Read More

Cognitive Therapy Found Effective in Unmedicated Psychotic Patients (And Other News)

For a long time, psychotherapy has been seen as providing little benefit to patients with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders. However, two recent studies, including one in unmedicated patients, have found cognitive therapy to be quite helpful. Read More

Can Unethical Research Ever Lead to "Best Evidence?"

As readers of this blog know, in my book Anatomy of an Epidemic, I investigated what science has to say about how psychiatric medications shape the long-term outcomes of major mental disorders, and it's fair to say that, given what I reported, some in the field of psychiatry are not happy with the book. Recently, Dr. Read More

A Rorschach Test for Psych Meds

On October 23, the New York Times ran a very nice feature story about a Los Angeles woman, Keris Myrick, who, even though she has a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, thrives today as CEO of Project Return Peer Support Network. Read More

Anatomy of an Epidemic Down Under

In New Zealand and Australia, usage of antidepressants is up . . . and so too the number of disabled mentally ill Read More

In Defense of Psychiatric Medications, Part Two

Marcia Angell’s two-part essay in the New York Review of Books, which appeared in the June and July issues, has helped trigger a much-needed societal discussion about the merits of psychiatric medications. Read More

The New York Times' Defense of Antidepressants

Today, the New York Times published an op-ed essay by Peter Kramer titled "In Defense of Antidepressants" on the front page of its Sunday Review section. Read More

Now Antidepressant-Induced Chronic Depression Has a Name: Tardive Dysphoria

Three recently published papers, along with a report by a Minnesota group on health outcomes in that state, provide new reason to mull over this question: Do antidepressants worsen the long-term course of depression? As I wrote in Anatomy of an Epidemic, I believe there is convincing evidence that the drugs do just that. These latest papers add to that evidence base. Read More

Drug Companies ‘Just Say No' to Psych Drugs

We Need a Thorough Investigation of the STAR*D Scandal

For some time now, the medical community -- and to a certain extent, the general public -- has understood that the reports in the medical literature of industry-funded trials of psychiatric drugs do not provide an accurate representation of the drugs' merits. Read More

Can Our Medical Model of Care Be Remade?

Yesterday, I have to confess, I experienced one of the more satisfying days of my journalistic career. Every journalist hopes that his or her writing will have an impact, and a few months ago, in response to Anatomy of an Epidemic, a diverse group of people established the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care. Read More

When Government Propaganda Masquerades as Science

Five years ago, Maryland psychologist Ed Pigott read the first published results of the NIMH's large STAR*D study of antidepressants and depression. However, even as he read that first article, he got the sense that "significant researcher trickery was afoot." Since then he has systematically exposed the trickery, piece by piece. Read More

Andreasen Drops A Bombshell: Antipsychotics Shrink the Brain

In 1991, Nancy Andreasen began a long-running study of first-episode schizophrenia patients, which involved periodically measuring their brain volumes with magnetic resonance scans. Read More

Disability in the Age of Prozac

In my book Anatomy of an Epidemic, I investigated this puzzle: Why has the number of adults on government disability due to mental illness soared since Prozac's arrival on the market in 1987? Read More

Psychiatric Drugs and Violence: A Review of FDA Data Finds A Link

There has been an enduring controversy over whether psychiatric medications can trigger violent actions toward others. Read More

Do Psychiatric Medications Impair Normal Brain Development?

At the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, which was held in San Diego from November 13-17, four poster presentations told of how, in animal studies, early exposure to psychiatric medications impaired normal brain development. Read More

The GlaxoSmithKline Ghostwriting Documents, Part Two

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported on how SmithKline Beecham paid a marketing company, Scientific Therapeutics Information (STI), to ghostwrite a medical textbook on psychopharmacology for family physicians, with Charles Nemeroff and Alan Schatzberg then signing off as authors of that textbook. Read More

A Ghostwritten Psychiatric Book Hints at a Much Larger Problem

The report by the New York Times today that a 1999 medical text authored by Dr. Charles Nemeroff and by Dr. Alan Schatzberg was ghostwritten and financed by a pharmaceutical firm seems—at first glance—to tell of a new level of corruption within American medicine. Read More

The Successful Creation of a Societal Delusion . . . and the Increase in Stigma It Has Spawned

In the era of biological psychiatry, an increase in stigma towards the "mentally ill" Read More

New Rat Study: SSRIs Markedly Deplete Brain Serotonin

SSRIs: Do they up brain serotonin levels? Or decrease them? Read More

Do Antidepressants Worsen the Long-term Course of Depression? Giovanni Fava Pushes the Debate Forward

In 1994, Italy's Giovanna Fava, editor-in-chief of the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, wrote for the first time of his concern that "long-term use of antidepressant drugs may increase, in some cases, the biochemical vulnerability to depression, and worsen its long-term outcomes and symptomatic expression." Since then, Fava has periodically revisited this issue, and he recentl Read More

SAMHSA, Alternatives, and a Psychiatrist’s Despair Over the State of American Science

In my last post, I told of my experience speaking at the Alternatives conference in Anaheim, and my frustration -- despair really -- over whether our society could ever have an honest discussion about the merits of psychiatric medications (and particularly their long-term merits.) That blog triggered a rather remarkable number of comments from readers, with many voicing similar thoughts about w Read More

SAMHSA, the Alternatives Conference, and the Story of an Opportunity Lost

In the last chapter of my book Anatomy of an Epidemic, I noted that if our society is going to stem the epidemic of disabling mental illness that has erupted during the past twenty years, then it needs to have an honest discussion about what is truly known about the biological causes of psychiatric disorders, and an honest discussion about how the medications affect the long-term cours Read More

The Question that Dare Not Be Asked

In the New York Times science section today (August 31), Weill Cornell Medical College psychiatrist Richard Friedman writes about how illicit drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine may permanently reduce a person's capacity for enjoying life's splendors. These drugs, he notes, activate the brain's reward system by releasing dopamine. Read More

The STAR*D Scandal: A New Paper Sums It All Up

The story of how the STAR*D results were misreported has been coming together for some time now, step by step, and a paper recently published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, along with a review of that paper published by Medscape Medical News on August 24, leads to an inescapable conclusion: This is a story of a scientific scandal, one that the public needs to know about. Read More

Charlie Rose and the Mentally Ill Brain

On a recent PBS television show hosted by Charlie Rose on the "mentally ill brain," Columbia University's Jeffrey Lieberman presented a series of brain scans of a person with schizophrenia, which showed enlarged ventricles and thus, as Lieberman told the audience, "loss of brain gray matter." Read More

"Broken Brains" and "Beautiful Minds"

When I first interviewed Brandon Banks, in the spring of 2008, while researching Anatomy of an Epidemic, he had recently entered Elizabethtown Community College in Kentucky, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Given his medical history, which included multiple psychiatric hospitalizations, this seemed like a bold dream, and few people in his life thought he would succeed at it. Read More

Medicating Children: A “Whistleblower’s” Lawsuit Raises a Novel Legal Question

In the past few years, a number of pharmaceutical companies have admitted to federal charges that they illegally marketed psychiatric medications for non-approved uses, with the companies paying large sums to settle the cases. Now, a legal complaint filed by the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights in an Alaskan federal court is raising a related question. Read More

Summing Up the NIMH Trials: Evidence of an Effective Paradigm of Care?

In the past 15 years, the NIMH has funded a number of major, multicenter trials of drug treatments for mental disorders in adults and children, and although these studies have not been placebo-controlled, they still provide insight into how well drug-treated patients are faring over longer periods of time. Read More

Yet Another Disappointment: First CATIE, and Now the 12-Month Results from TEOSS

The NIMH's CATIE trial of antipsychotics for adult schizophrenia is regularly understood to have shown that atypical antipsychotics are "no better" than the old standard antipsychotics. The CATIE study was one of several government-funded trials, here in the United States and in the United Kingdom, to come to that finding. Read More

Robert Whitaker is a journalist who writes mostly about medicine and science; his latest book is Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.

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