Customer Reviews

Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent

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A one-of-a-kind book that does not to presume to say "do or don't". Impeccably researched, it is a must read for anyone interested in the undisclosed facts about many psychiatric medications: namely, how they stress the brain and create life-long patients. Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent is presented succinctly, is easily read and broken down for the layman or professional. Lest the reader lose hope, the book also presents "evidence based" literature which demonstrates the existence of safe and effective alternatives to psychiatric drugs.

Very highly recommended. After obtaining data through the Freedom of Information Act from the FDA, Dr. Irving Kirsch did an analysis of the 6 most widely used antidepressant drugs. It found that on average they only have an 18% effect over and above placebo effects. Given the side effects, expense, and withdrawal syndrome, these kinds of findings should cause everyone to reevaluate reliance on medication treatment. There are similar findings with anxiety medications, and shockingly, the average ritalin follow-up study is only 3 weeks long. However, tne multi-billion dollar drug companies have tremendous influence on psychiatry and the FDA. The public must realize that FDA approval for a drug only requires 2 controlled studies showing a statistical significance over a placebo, and there is no limit on how many other studies have been done that found no positive effect. Although medications can certainly play a role in treatment, this book will inform the public and mental health professionals alike on how over-rated medication treatment is.

Dr. Grace Jackson has done an excellent job in engaging and capturing the reader's attention beginning with the Prologue and ending with the epilogue... Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent.... as Emeril would say.... BAM!!! Job well done.

The structure of the book is well organized; the headings are clearly defined with supporting data, statistics, and content. The size of font and spacing are excellent ... I appreciate that the paragraphs are not lengthy and made for easy reading.

The book is a worthy reference manual. literally... each line led me to want to read more. more .. faster and faster.. I did not find myself having to ask, what am I reading? What is this author trying to tell me?

Most of chapters are short (7,8,9-are longer chapters), concise, clearly outlined, digestible, revelant, not awkward or overly complicated, and they flow.

Beginning with chapters 4 to 9 Dr. Jackson provides a variety of scientific studies, visual aids, tables, and comparison studies, which substantiate the content of her book.

I appreciate that Dr. Jackson deciphers and explains the comprehensive data for the non-scientific mind in chapters
4 to 9

As a mental health professional, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent has now equipped me with some vital information to be a more effective clinician.

A hundred thanks you, Dr. Jackson!!!

The very best I have read on the subject of psychiatric drugs...Dr. Jackson does not merely describe the effects of the Rx as with most other text on the subject, but actually provides explainations for the effects. It is exceptionally well researched and written and does indeed provide a guide for informed consent. In fact it provides a very sound critque for NOT consenting to psychiatric drugs...Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs should be compulsory reading for all Health Professionals as part of their CME ( continiung medical education). It is written ineasy to understand language without the extreme academic medical jargon incomprehensible to the layman. It is an ideal book for those who have found themeselves having to care for someone who has been labelled as "mentally ill"...and being treated with these mind altering drugs. The book is a revelation that these Rx's do indeed prevent symptomatic recovery...ask any patient in a psychiatric ward.

Dr. Grace Jackson has done the human race a great service. She has produced
an Owners Manual for the human brain.

This book goes far beyond "informed consent".

More precisely, this is a "Shop Manual", of the sort normally reserved for the
"priesthood" of technicians who work in the "under the hood" innerds
of todays highly complex marvels.

Because of the deluge of misinformation and disinformation on the human mind
one is faced with in everyday life; it is vital to get the straight story. Anything less
might produce catastrophic consequences. Dr. Jackson's no nonsense approach demystifies
this much-bedeviled topic.

This is not light reading. While her book is a meticulously documented and precise
treatise written by a professional for professionals; Dr. Jackson provides helpful, brief
explanations of the medical terms involved for the lay reader.

This book should be standard equipment for every human being.

Keep it handy in your "glove compartment".


Vince Boehm, Wilmington, DE

This is a brilliant and well referenced book. Dr. Jackson explores the scientific information involving psychiatric medication. Not the usual stuff from the sales oriented psychiatric establishment or from antidrug supplement salespeople. As a psychiatrist, I have read the book three times as the detail and complexity merit repeated readings. This should be a standard text for medical students and psychiatry trainees - psychiatrists should not be recertified for their boards unless they know the information in this splendid book. If you are a patient, looking for information upon which to make an informed decision about a potential drug therapy, 'Rethinking' has what you need. The book describes drugs in general and then goes into detail about specific classes of drugs. Information is both scientifically and technically appropriate for physicians and also readable and informative for the patient. Dr. Jackson has performed a major service to humanity in this book.

I have read several dozen of the (broadly) popular-market books that discuss psychoactive medications and the regulatory policies (and politics) that have got them embedded as the chosen form of treatment for psychiatric illness. (This falls squarely in the middle of my area of academic research.) Several of these books are excellent: Greenberg's and Moncrieff's books stand out, and Whitaker's, Watters' and some of Healy's critiques are also well worth reading. But Jackson's book is in a class by itself. There is a lot of technical medical and pharmacological detail in the book, but it is, in general, well presented and broadly comprehensible even to (attentive) readers who do NOT have specialist medical training. The narrative is also clear and well presented, and the overall argument is cogently framed. It is well worth reading.

Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent by Grace Jackson
is a well researched book about the dangers of psychiatric drugs,

It should be used by judges and the courts, and read by lawyers and doctors.

Informed Consent does not apply in psychiatry, the patients are forced to take harmful drugs without the rights to refuce them in New Zealand.

Some medical professionals take care to make their writing accessible to the lay reader. In the Netherlands, for instance, Ivan Wolffers has been doing this for decades. Recently Deyo & Patrick published another fine example of such writing in the US.

Jackson does the opposite. She takes information that has been known to psychiatric victims and the lay people who care about them for half a century, and recasts it in pharmacochemical jargon that should appeal to the professional reader, particularly physicians. For instance, instead of pointing out that different things can have a bad effect on the chemical balance in our bodies, she states "...derangements of glucose and lipid metabolism are multifactorially determined." Not that physicians on the whole are better equipped to understand this type of lingo than lay people, but it will hopefully make them take Jackson's message seriously. As precisely physicians should be reading this, I highly applaud Jackson's work, though I'm not quite sure it was her intention to address her peers.

Between the fancy words Jackson points out that physicians, and particularly psychiatrists, are trained to ignore the testimony of their own eyes and ears in favor of (mis)information from published drug trials. "Evidence biased medicine" she calls them. The design of these trials has been manipulated to obscure the drugs' inefficacy and the harm they do. "The pharmaceutical industry pays the piper, and the pharmaceutical industry calls the tune. In the field of psychiatry, the tune has one lyric: drug therapies are effective, safe, and well tolerated." In reality, the data reveal that the drug with the highest efficacy and safety rates is consistently the placebo. Comparison of data pertaining to psychiatric patients in Northwest Wales in 1896 and 1996 show that mortality was higher in the second group. In other words, one hundred years later, outcomes are worse than before psychopharmacology was invented. In a longitudinal study in Vermont, all of the patients with full recoveries were among the 50% who had stopped taking medications.

She further says that:
>
Depression is an episodic phenomenon that has been turned into a lifelong disease by pharmacotherapy. Antidepressant-withdrawal symptoms have been used by the industry to construct a mythology of chronic disease. The FDA backed down on demands to put a warning about increased risk for suicidality on the label of antidepressants because of pressure from the American Psychiatric Association.

The dopamine theory of schizophrenia has been challenged and revised even by some of its original proponents. Fifty years of research have failed to confirm the existence of any pre-medication dopamine imbalance in the blood, urine, or spinal fluid of people experiencing psychosis. There aren't even any tests for measuring dopamine levels in the human brain. Suppositions about the reliability of information from brain scans are wrong. Such instruments are seldom employed by clinicians outside of research settings anyway.

On the other hand, there are dopamine receptors throughout the brain and body, all of which are affected by psycho-drugs. In the discussion of medication effects in the chronically neuroleptized (her term), large networks of neurophysiology are consistently neglected.
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What tantalizes me is the subtitle of the book and that she sandwiches her excellent exposures between a prologue and an epilogue about informed consent. Whose consent does she mean? Her writing will certainly be an eye-opener for physicians who have kept their eyes firmly shut until now. But informed consent is supposed to come from the patient, not the physician. She writes: "Informed consent has been jeopardized by the subjugation of medicine to the motives and methods of industry." What has been subjugated by the motives and methods of industry is physicians' protocol. Informed consent from the patient never existed. When is the last time your doctor asked your consent, informed or not? Even in somatic medicine, which is supposedly voluntary, you're given a prescription and told to take it. Informed consent is a legal fiction justifying physicians' authority over their patients.

When it comes to recommendations for improvement, Jackson displays praiseworthy restraint. She lists just three, on the last page of the book:

* researchers and regulators should acknowledge and correct the methodological deficiencies of research on psychiatric drugs;
* clinicians should recognize the philosophical limitations of Evidence Based (as opposed to Reality Based) Medicine;
* physicians should be allowed and unafraid to reject the conflict-ridden, profit driven guidelines, consensus statements, and review processes which are now imposed on them.

Of course none of that is going to happen, any more than physicians are going to read this book. Jackson lets them off lightly, as though they are innocent victims of pharmaceutical and political corruption. But physicians, and especially psychiatrists, do not ignore the testimony of their eyes and ears for no reason. They too benefit from the "simulacrum of medicine ... based upon illusion" as she calls it.

In the Netherlands, psychiatrists earn between 100,000 and 200,000 ( roughly US$145,000 - US$290,000, at the current exchange rate) per year, not counting kickbacks, honoraria, fake research fees, free vacations, and other pharma-bribes. In the United States and Canada their incomes are no more modest. In what other profession can one achieve such high status and earnings without ever accomplishing anything? How would psychiatrists make that kind of money without their "simulacrum" and the poison pills they push down the throats of powerless patients to maintain the illusion of healing? Their profession consists precisely of turning healthy people with social problems which they (the psychiatrists) cannot solve into lifelong neurological cripples whose iatrogenic disability appears to justify their treatment by psychiatrists.

This is Jackson's unambiguous message. Hurray to Jackson for joining the whistle blowers.

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