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The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment

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Depression was once viewed as a state of mind caused by stressful life factors, but today the majority of Americans believe depression is a biological disease caused by chemical imbalance in the brain. This shift in the way "mental disorders" like depression and anxiety are viewed has resulted in profound social and cultural changes. Antidepressants are now the most widely prescribed class of medications in the U.S., and many states have enacted parity legislation requiring insurance coverage for mental illness equal to physical illness. Soldiers returning from Iraq are encouraged to seek treatment for post-traumatic stress, and Congress may pass a "Mothers Act" to promote screening new moms for postpartum depression. In many classrooms more than half the students are on medications for attention deficit and similar disorders, and the number of U.S. children diagnosed with bipolar disorder has risen an astounding 4,000% in the past ten years. Almost weekly we hear of yet another school shooting, with headlines clamoring for early intervention and mandatory treatment of "at risk" individuals.

Against this backdrop of a seemingly rampant epidemic of mental illness, Joanna Moncrieff has written a brilliant new book calling into question nearly everything commonly believed about the nature of psychiatric illness and psychiatric medication. First and foremost, this book shatters the myth that psychiatric drugs restore chemical balance. Page by page and chapter by chapter, Dr. Moncrieff systematically exposes the shoddy science, flawed research and deceptive marketing campaigns which have led us down a sadly mistaken path that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with profit.

Among the most interesting chapters, Moncrieff methodically examines what happens to patients on different classes of psychiatric drugs. The so-called antipsychotics such as Zyprexa and Risperdal achieve their therapeutic effects by causing a form of Parkinson's disease, while the so-called SSRI antidepressants such as Prozac and Zoloft have comparatively little effect on the brain but often cause nausea and seem to work mostly as active placebos, barely outperforming inactive placebos such as simple sugar pills.

Because the author follows strict scientific methods and carefully documents every step of her work, this is not a book that will appeal to a mass audience, but for anyone seriously interested in genuine medical research unfettered by special interests dedicated to maximizing pharmaceutical profits, I cannot recommend this book too highly. Joanna Moncrieff's The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment belongs on the reference shelf alongside Grace E. Jackson's Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent and Peter R. Breggin's Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex.

I've worked in Psychiatry for 15 years and kept a constant eye on the legitimacy of the foundations of the discipline. The Bio-Psychiatric models stands or falls on its premise that mental disorders are biological diseases, and, one is left with no doubt upon reading this book, that Bio-Psychiatry falls. I've waited to read this book since I heard of its imminent publication, and relished every well researched word. I can not speak highly enough of this work and the on-going work of Dr Moncrieff and others of the Critical Psychiatry Network. It leaves me with questions and a nasty sense that I am engaging in an essentially immoral discipline and causes me to wonder whether - to paraphrase Chomsky - I should stop tyranny by stopping my participation in it. My only criticism of the book is that it could quite easily have been twice as long, and I was, at certain points, wishing that the author had gone into more detail on some issues. But, that said, this is the best book I've read on the issue of Psychiatric medications and the political-economy of the whole Psychiatric apparatus. I hope it wins the MIND book of the year and forces inroads into the profession itself.

If I were a patient of the Mental Health system this book would accompany me to every appointment I had with mental health professionals and would hopefully force some very thorny issues, that rarely arise in Psychiatric consultations, to the surface to be answered.

For both my research and my own personal enlightenment I have read virtually every book published since Listening to Prozac on the use of drugs in psychiatric practice. While I love the work of David Healy and still consider him, in fact, the best resource overall on this issue, I am now convinced that Joanna Moncrieff's book is the single best one volume treatment available. What Moncreiff does beautifully is combine three things: a history of psychiatric practice, an analysis of the science supporting (or, so often, not supporting) psychiatric practice and a sustained polemic to the effect that psychiatry should abandon its disease-centered model and adopt instead a drug-centered model. As I say, Healy, too, addresses these issues in his many books and articles, and his work is absolutely priceless, but Moncreiff's ability to distill the essence of Healy's critique, while making substantial contributions of her own, into a single, extremely well-organized and easy to read volume, makes this the one book that everyone with any kind of stake in any aspect of mental health should read.

This is one of the most important books to come out in the last few years that exposes the truth about the toxicity and innapropriate claims and marketing of most of the currently used psychiatric drugs, from anti-depressants to "mood stabilizers" [actually only anti-epilepsy drugs], including Lithium, to anti-psychotics.

This book provides a well balanced critique of psychiatric drugs. While those who prescribe these drugs claim that they know a lot about them, the reality is, that there is much that they don't know. It is very well written. The author is to be congratualted for her research.