Customer Reviews

Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill

5 star:		(57)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I normally never write review but feel as though this book is worthy of one. What the author does in this book is what journalists fail to do. He investigates the people in charge of taking care of the mentally ill in a way that makes the reader wonder who is the one that is really ill.
He starts out with a brief history of how mentally ill people have been treated throughout history. From hydrotherapy to metrazol, insulin coma, draining of blood, "tranquilizer chairs", etc. This progresses to the more recent introduction of neuroleptics in the 1950's and how they induce a sort of parkinsonism. What's most revealing about these drugs is how he points out that people who never take them are more likely to recover. In this part of the book, he also talks about Freeman's disgusting labotomy procedures in which he pokes the patient about the eye and places a stick in their head and wiggles it to destroy the frontal lobes. Patients then go on to act like children and even continue eating after vomiting in their own food.
With all that said, the most revealing aspect is the fact that people in less developed countries fare a lot better with schizophrenia than people in more developed countries. The introduction of atypical neuroleptics also reveal how "dirty" these drugs really are in that they target so many different neurotransmitters. He goes on to point so many conflicts of interest in regards to the reviews of drugs that it left me shocked.
The saddest part of the book is the story of various individuals. A young woman was taken off venlafaxine and given amphetamines to induce her psychosis to the point where they could experiment on her using brain scans. She then goes home for a day even though she isn't supposed to, does various household chores and leaves to go jump off a bridge. The greatest thing that can be taken from this book is not only how various doctors have experimented on the mentally ill with the so-called science of eugenics as well as the notion that mentally ill people are less human but the example treatment put forth by the Quakers as well as the Sorteria project. Mentally ill people deserve better treatment in this country as well as better healthcare overall. A WAKE UP CALL. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

In 1968 I and a friend decided to get out of the Army by pretending we were crazy. We ended up in a major Army psych ward on the west coast. I saw first hand how patients looked before and directly after shock treatment and heavy psych drugs. Although my psychiatrist knew I was faking it (but couldn't prove it) he casually suggested that "maybe some shock treatment might help," while watching me for any reaction. My stomach turned into a knot as I tried to suppress the terror I felt when I realized he could do just that and there was nothing I could do about it.
That relatively mild experience helps me to get a little idea of the utter horror some of the patients I saw and those in this book must have felt.
It's difficult to believe that in this country where "all men are created equal" our fellow citizens have been treated as they have simply because they made the mistake of going to a phychiatrist for help. It should read "all men minus the mentally ill or those we consider unfit are created equal."
This book should be a wake up call to all of those artists, dreamers, eccentrics, religious believers, minorities or any other groups that might be considered different. To one of these phychiatrists you just may have a delusional disorder (because you don't think like everyone else) and should be put on medication to release you from your "mental illness."
If you value your personal freedom and our way of life in this country, please read this book and tell others to read it.
The keywords "alternative mental health" brings up some useful alternatives for mental health that are not mind numbing.
Also, "niacin and schizophrenia" is good.

This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about a person struggling with schizophrenia. As a former president of a county chapter of NAMI, I want to plainly state that Whitaker's charges of collusion between drug companies and institutions and organizations purporting to care for the mentally ill are not far-fetched. Some of his arguments are painted with a very broad brush, but that doesn't make them invalid.
The statistics involving mental illness in third-world countries simply can't be ignored. This book has altered my thinking regarding anti-psychotics. Family members who dismiss this book may be acting out of fear and unwillingness to change.
This book isn't the holy grail. But it provides startling information, and shouldn't be missed.

Robert Whitaker has written a readable, well-documented, and disturbing book about the arrogant and sometimes monstrous behavior of American psychiatrists towards those they label as schizophrenic. He reveals that psychiatrists, desperate to show the biological basis of mental illness and thus establish their profession as a truly medical one, have since 1750 to the present distorted and covered up research, ignored risks, and abused helpless patients.

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.

Admittedly, Whitaker has his bias, but his description of how the mentally ill, especially those with schitzophrenia, is frightening, and altogether too true. What is really scary, though, is how much of the abuse -- tainted drug trials, experiementing on those who have not given informed consent -- has gone on just in the last two decades. And the side effects of these medications are not to be taken lightly. My ex-mother-in-law has schitzophrenia and bi-polar, and the meds she took, while they seemed to keep her sane but somewhat weird, caused the dreaded side effects Whitaker describes--tardive diskonisia, flat affect, weird mouth movements, and so on. Ironically, she is now off all medications and doing no worse than she was on the medication. I take one of the "atypicals," and while I haven't had serious side effects with it, I wonder if I really need this medication. This book certainly gives me plenty to talk over with my doctor, and anyone who has a mental illness or a loved one who does should read this book and talk it over with their doctor, too.

My one gripe--very little was said about bi-polar disorder and nothing about depression.

I won't go into details on the other reviews...I just know that coming from a family history of 'mental disorders' that this book was a breath of fresh air to me. My grandmother grew up, clinically depressed, in the unfortunate time of the 1940's -'50's, and was subjected to ECT...the author did a wonderful job of outlining the terrible injustices that were done, not only to my grandmother's era, but up until, and through, the introduction of the so-called 'wonder-drugs' of the 60's...
which seem, as he outlines, in scientific and moral commentary, to be no more than 'chemical restraints'...he continues on through the mid 90s, asking real, and relevant, questions, about the newest, 'clinically approved' 'raved on about' drugs...
When will this mode of medicine come to real terms of what it is to be 'mentally ill'? When will this field of the mind stop deluding itself that it's making some *real* progress? There are some real, and frightening, accounts in this book that the field of the mind will continue to be exploited, for Pharmaceutical profits, instead of a real, humanitarian view of human beings in all their different manifestations. Let's hope that Mr. Whitaker's account will move a few people...

Whitaker and many of the reviewers here have a lot to say about schizophrenics and their medical treatment. Since I actually have schizoaffective disorder (a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) myself, I'd like to say a few words.

This subject is somewhat interesting to a lot of people in theory, but it's my life. I became ill in my early 20s and was beset by mania, depression, and psychosis. The mania and depression were a walk in the park on a sunny day compared to the psychosis. I heard loud, terrifying voices which threatened to kill me and worse. The voices sounded absolutely real and were impossible to ignore. I was completely disabled by them.

I was a smart young woman with a good education, but I could barely leave my house, let alone work. I could not even have a meaningful conversation with my friends or family because the voices were too loud. My parents became my caretakers and my friends disappeared completely.

This went on for years as I tried different antipsychotics. They worked to a degree but the voices did not go away. They certainly did not get better on their own--despite my family's love, kindness and support. Their are no words to describe how hellish and worthless my life felt.

Geodon, the antipsychotic I had settled on, began to give me symptoms of dyskinesia and my doctor insisted that I stop taking it right away and start taking a new drug: Seroquel.

Within weeks of starting the Seroquel, the voices dropped off and all but disappeared. They are very few and far between now and they no longer sound real. It took me a while to get used to living without my constant fear of the voices. I adjusted slowly and with cautious optimism--what if this didn't last?

It lasted. Several years have passed and the Seroquel is still working. All drugs have possible side effects (Seroquel can cause dangerously high blood sugar which can lead to diabetes) so I have a battery of blood tests done every year. I am in fine shape physically and mentally. I am certainly not "subdued" or "chemically lobotomized."

I am happier and more productive than I have ever been before in my life.

The pharmaceutical industry, which Whitaker and so many reviewers here disdain, restored my sanity and saved my life. I am no longer afraid to leave my house and I have a good job. I have a great relationship with my family and I can talk to anyone at anytime without being interrupted by voices. I have friends and a social life again.

This may not sound exceptional to a normal person, but it means the world to me. None of this would be possible without the drugs I take. I take them happily and with more gratitude than Whitaker and his acolytes will ever know or understand.

I realize that my experience is not everyone's. Like normal people, all schizophrenics are different and we respond differently to different drugs and therapies. Whitaker would have you believe that all psychiatric drugs are completely useless and even detrimental to people like me, though, and that is simply not the truth--not my truth, anyway.

edit: I should have mentioned that I work in NYC. The streets are full of unmedicated schizophrenics. Some of them beg for money but others are too out of it to do even that--they are completely absorbed in the fights they're having with their voices. I'd like to bring Whitaker along with me to see them--would he really claim they're better off than I am? Happier? Healthier?

I give them money and protein bars (I want to make them feel better if only temporarily and I don't know what else to do) but most people just hurry away from them in fear and disgust.

I would never, ever want to trade places with them and neither would Whitaker or anyone else.

"Mad in America" is heart breaking. The expose examines the paradox: "Schizophrenic outcomes in the United States and other developed countries today are much worse than in the poor countries of the world."

Journalist Robert Whitaker, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, showcases the first hospital for the insane. In 1751 the Quakers began a moral treatment that included exercise, social activities and work. These methods had remarkable cure rates (unreachable with today's care). However, one can easily see there is no money to be made via the aforementioned interventions. Therefore, by mid-1800s, the medical field, fearful of losing power, began to become interested in using medical knowledge to treat the insane. Whitaker elucidates the shift of power from humane treatment to "enlightened" medical treatments such as insulin coma therapy, ECT, lobotomies and the present use of mind-numbing neuroleptics (originally used on prisoners to quiet them down) and other drug therapies that prove to be quite dangerous due to their serious side-effects. In short, the suffering of the mentally ill have been compounded as the current sadistic milieu uses them as a cash cow.

Whitaker's writing paints the horror all too well. One begins to wonder if the guilty psychiatrists, researchers and pharmaceutical companies ever look in the mirror. The evidence of their criminal relationship is laid out clearly by Whitaker. "Mad in America" is a testament that cries out for massive changes within the corrupted pharmaceutical field of treating the mentally-ill.

Bohdan Kot

I am writing this review because I found none of the previous reviews very helpful. Whitaker has proposed an entirely different way of looking at the ways that America treats schizophrenia. It has some similarities to the arguments that one hears from some consumer/survivor groups in that it is strongly and radically critical of current American psychiatry. However Whitaker does a superficially plausible job of criticizing the professional literature that purports to show that the anti-psychotic medications (both "typical" and "atypical") are effective treatments. Is he right in his criticisms? Although I am a mental health professional researcher and have worked in the field for over 20 years, I don't know. But it seems to me that it is to his credit that I can't discount it right away. He might be wrong but it is the most coherent critique of biological psychiatry that I have seen.
If I had schizophrenia, I would not decide that I should go off of my medications because of what Whitaker has written but I would look for more of an answer from my psychiatrist than a bland assurance that science has shown these medications to work.

As a psychiatrist since 1947, I cannot praise sufficiently Robert Whitaker's superb expose of how my specialty's intoxication with drugs has destroyed its ability to help its patients. He describes the fraudulence .of the entire psychopharmaceutical revolution, and exposes hidden facts, such as the worsenng treatment results in schizophrenia, the most serious mental disorder, and how those who have recovered from thse disorders did so for the most part without drugs. It is unfortunate .that drug-company-influenced professionals have prevented this important book from getting the major publication reviews which it certainly desrves....