Customer Reviews

Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease)

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David Healy is a professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University; in clear, jargon free prose he writes the history of mental illness, how our concepts and treatments of mental disorders have changed. He believes that history is part of the scientific process because by examining our beliefs and how they have changed we challenge them; he ridicules those like Fukuyama who believe that history has come to an end since the underlying notion of the end of history as well as the public relations departments of the pharmaceutical companies is that our practices are perfect and need never change. As evidence of the contrary, Healy notes, among many examples, such contemporary barbarism as the "treatment" of a 4 year old and a 2 year old with psychotropic drugs that resulted in their deaths.
Transnational corporations did not enter the mental illness market until after WWII. Among other things, WWII brought a paradigm shift in how disease was treated. Drugs such as antibiotics became the focus of all treatments, including mental illness. Chemical companies saw huge profits in drugs and spun off new drug companies which have become the most profitable corporate entities worldwide. As part of this history, much of the early focus on creating new drugs was the exploration of chemical dyes used in the chemical industry and to this day there are many drugs which resulted from that research. In order to maintain their profits, the drug companies aka "Big Pharm" have turned the science of mental health into junk. This is a partial list of how the pharmaceutical companies market their products:
1. They create associations for mental health care professionals and fund their publications;
2. The associations they fund not only serve to promote their products but to create consensus and guidelines to force doctors to use their costly patented products, rather than older generics, or face exposure to lawsuit regardless of whether or not the older products may be at least as effective as the new;
3. Not only do the pharmaceuticals fund existing publications, they help create new ones to promote drugs for new mental disorders;
4. The creation of new disorders is so rapid that a professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins complained that eventually everyone would be designated as mentally ill and looked forward to a mental illness that would include fat, short men of Irish descent, such as himself;
5. In order to ensure a demand for their new drugs, the pharmaceuticals actively promote self help or confessional books by non professionals on the latest mental illness, including publicity hand outs to mainstream outlets such as Time magazine and the New York Times;
6. Not only do the pharmaceuticals fund clinical trials for FDA approval but they suppress clinical trials that do not support licensing of their drugs;
7. Pharmaceuticals ghostwrite publications signed by leading academics for publication in respected medical journals;
8. Pharmaceuticals have dropped using salesmen and women to promote their products and rely upon academics because the academics are cheaper and more effective with doctors;
9. Pharmaceuticals directly market to consumers and entice them to visit their websites and to use rating scales which lead the consumer to believe that he or she has the disorder requiring the use of their expensive, patented drug; and,
10. Pharmaceuticals have no interest in researching drugs that might alleviate major diseases such as AIDS in the poorer parts of the world; instead, they focus on lifestyle drugs such as Viagra for the relatively well to do.
So what is the result of the junk science of mental illness? The astonishing fact is that unique among illnesses in the Western World, the life expectancy for patients with serious mental illness has declined. In some parts of the first world, rates of suicide for the seriously mental ill have increased ten fold.

Ce que nous démontre brillamment David Healy dans ce livre, en s'appuyant sur le cas particulier de l'histoire, extrêmement bien documentée, du trouble bipolaire, c'est que le savoir psychiatrique d'aujourd'hui, celui qui est partagé par les médecins comme celui qui est diffusé dans le grand public, s'apparente à une pseudo-science. Cette dernière modifie profondément la représentation que avons de nous-mêmes alors qu'elle n'est orientée que par la nécessité pour les firmes d'obtenir des autorisations de mise sur le marché et par des contraintes de marketing visant à étendre au maximum la commercialisation de tel ou tel psychotrope (en incluant les enfants dès leur plus jeune âge, au besoin).
C'est toute une logique de type marchande qui met à son service les soignants et fait peser un risque sur les patients, en réduisant la pratique des soins à l'échange d'un produit de consommation, clairement délimité et en élaguant de ce fait tout ce qui n'entre pas dans ce cadre, principalement le rapport humain et l'engagement dans la durée auprès des patients.
Ce livre est tout à fait essentiel et doit être lu de toute urgence par tous ceux qui sont concernés par ces questions et qui espèrent que la médecine en général et la psychiatrie en particulier cessent de dériver.

This book needs to be read and be text in all study of this phenomenom called Bipolar, by all the Doctors, including Psychiatrists,' Psychologists,' Psychiatric Nurse Practitioners,'& Mental Health Counselors, whomever has diagnosed this disorder, and all who may eventually diagnose any pharmaceutical really. The AMA, researchers and developers, academics, and marketers may be suspect, perhaps even our economy.

I loved this book for its history on mania but wish it went further to discuss how it impacts today's bipolar "craze". I think too many people are diagnosed with bipolar. As a psychiatrist with the disorder, I greatly enjoyed reading the book and recommend it for patients and physicians alike!