E. Fuller Torrey’s Review of Anatomy of an Epidemic: What Does It Reveal About the Rationale for Forced Treatment?

E. Fuller Torrey, through his Treatment Advocacy Center, is the country’s most prominent advocate for outpatient commitment laws, which typically force people with a diagnosis of a severe mental illness to take antipsychotic medications. He has posted a review of …
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May 16, 2012 | Categorized in: Blogs

Guidelines for a Thoughtful Discussion

Back in December,  when I decided to turn madinamerica.com into a webzine, I envisioned it as serving several purposes. I wanted to create a regular news report of research findings. I wanted to provide a forum for people to tell …
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April 21, 2012 | Categorized in: Blogs

Interpreting Harrow’s 20-Year Results: Are the Drugs to Blame?

Martin Harrow has just published his 20-year outcomes data for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Those who took antipsychotics regularly experienced more psychosis, more anxiety, cognitive impairment, and markedly fewer periods of “sustained recovery.” Harrow asks: “Is very long-term treatment with antipsychotic medications undesirable?”
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February 23, 2012 | Categorized in: Blogs

The Real Suicide Data from the TADS Study Comes to Light

Last week, Robert Gibbons reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry that fluoxetine was not found to increase the suicide risk in children compared to placebo. But if we closely examine the suicide data from the TADS trial, which at first glance seems to support Gibbons’ conclusion, we find a trail of hidden data and scientific scandal.
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February 20, 2012 | Categorized in: Blogs

The Taint of Eugenics In NIMH-Funded Research Today

Recently, Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, identified the “NIMH’s Top 10 Research Advances of 2011.” He wrote: “This has been a year of exciting discoveries and scientific progress . . . Here are 10 breakthroughs and events of 2011 that are changing the landscape of mental health research.”

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January 25, 2012 | Categorized in: Blogs, Pregnancy & Birth Defects

Rethinking Brain Research In Psychiatry

The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA is one of the premier centers for brain research in the country, and so when the Institute announced in late December that its scientists had discovered a “brain cell malfunction in schizophrenia,” …
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January 12, 2012 | Categorized in: Blogs, Pregnancy & Birth Defects

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. In the first study, …
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December 10, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

Answering the Critics: Let’s Roll the Tape (Again)

This past summer, Behavioral Healthcare ran a two-part interview with me about my book, Anatomy of an Epidemic. This stirred William Glazer, a well-known psychiatrist who has served as a consultant to Eli Lilly since 1992 (and to other pharmaceutical …
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November 30, 2011 | Categorized in: Answering the Critics, Blogs

A Rorschach Test for Psych Drugs

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 …
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November 2, 2011 | Categorized in: Adult, Antidepressants, Antipsychotics, Anxiety, Benzodiazepines, Blogs, Depression, Disorders, Mood Stabilizers, Psychiatric Drugs, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders

Anatomy of an Epidemic Down Under: Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Disabling Mental Illness in New Zealand and Australia

During the past six months, I have traveled to a number of English speaking countries to speak about my book Anatomy of an Epidemic, and everywhere—Canada, the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand (and Iceland)—I find the same questions being asked. Why, …
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September 16, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

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. Numerous web sites and bloggers have commented on …
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August 2, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

The New York Times’ Defense of Antidepressants

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. In Anatomy of an Epidemic, I wrote …
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July 10, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

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 …
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June 30, 2011 | Categorized in: Adult, Antidepressants, Blogs, Depression, Disorders, Psychiatric Drugs

Drug Companies ‘Just Say No’ to Psych Drugs

The market for psychiatric drugs is, of course,  booming. In 2011, spending on psychiatric medications can expect to top $40 billion. Yet, in spite of this soaring market, a number of pharmaceutical companies are now dramatically scaling back on their …
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June 27, 2011 | Categorized in: Antidepressants, Antipsychotics, Blogs, Psychiatric Drugs

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 …
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May 28, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

After 25 Posts on this Website, Dr. Mark Foster is Terminated by his Employer

On September 18, 2010, Mark Foster, a family physician in Littleton, Colorado, began his “Letters From the Front Lines” blog for this website. In it, he writes eloquently and thoughtfully about his changing views about psychiatric medications and psychiatric diagnoses. …
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May 25, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs, Non-Drug Approaches, Recovery/Empowerment

Should the Medical Literature Be Cleansed of All STAR*D Articles?

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.  The trials …
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May 5, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

Anatomy of an Epidemic wins investigative journalism award

Investigative Reporters and Editors recently named Anatomy of an Epidemic as the winner of its 2010 best “investigative journalism” award in the books category. Here is the IRE’s citation: Book:Robert Whitaker for “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and …
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April 26, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

Rethinking Mental Health Care: The Story of the Oregon Symposium and the Foundation that Sponsored It

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 …
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March 30, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

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. In articles published in 2003 and 2005, she reported finding “progressive brain volume reductions” in her patients, …
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February 14, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

Speaking at MGH Grand Rounds, and More

As many readers of this blog may know, I spoke at the psychiatric department’s Grand Rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital on January 13, which was covered by Carey Goldberg, a reporter for WBUR. My talk at the Grand Rounds was …
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January 21, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

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. A review of the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System  by Thomas Moore, Joseph Glenmullen and Curt Furberg, which was published by PLoS One on …
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January 5, 2011 | Categorized in: Blogs

Updates on the Epidemic

Here’s a rundown of a hodgepodge of studies that I’ve come across recently that relate to themes I wrote about in Anatomy of an Epidemic. (Two of the studies were published prior to 2010, but it was only recently that …
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December 5, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

Do Psychiatric Drugs 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. After the animals …
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December 4, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

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 …
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December 1, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

A Ghostwritten Psychiatric Textbook 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 …
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November 30, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

Volunteers for Psychotherapy Is A Finalist for International Award

Volunteers for Psychotherapy, which is located in Hartford, Connecticut, and has for years run an innovative program that gets clients involved in community programs, has been named a finalist in an international national competition run by an online community called …
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November 26, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

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

Ever since the revised edition of DSM III was published in 1987, the psychiatric establishment in the United States — i.e., the American Psychiatric Association, NAMI, the NIMH, and the pharmaceutical industry — has been telling the American public that …
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November 4, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

Tardive Dyskinesia in the Atypicals Era: Is The Risk Any Less Today Than Before?

A few weeks ago, while I was at a birthday celebration, a friend who works in a mental health setting remarked that she was seeing an increasing number of people taking atypical antipsychotics who were developing tardive dyskinesia. The common …
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November 2, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

New Rat Study: SSRIs Markedly Deplete Brain Serotonin

Dutch investigators will soon publish an article in Neurochemistry International that sheds light on how SSRI antidepressants affect the serotonergic system over the longer term, and why abrupt discontinuation of an SSRI can be so problematic. The study also serves …
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November 1, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

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 …
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October 25, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

SAMHSA, Alternatives, and A Psychiatrist’s Despair over the State of American Science

In my last post on my Psychology Today blog, which I also publish here, I told of my experience speaking at the Alternatives conference in Anaheim, and my frustration — despair really — over whether our society could ever have …
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October 10, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

SAMHSA, Alternatives, 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 …
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October 8, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs, Community, Non-Drug Approaches, Recovery/Empowerment

And Now For the Rest of the Story

Check out the story that appeared on August 30 on CNN.com titled “Growing Up Bipolar,”  and the one  on August 31 in the New York Times’s science section, titled “Lasting Pleasures, Robbed by Drug Abuse.” Both reveal a lot about …
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August 31, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

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 …
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August 27, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

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 …
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August 12, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

News Roundup From June

There are a number of bloggers that regularly send out news of the latest findings reported in psychiatric journals and other media, and I thought it might be helpful to periodically post summaries of those reports. Here’s a brief recap …
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July 5, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

”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 …
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July 2, 2010 | Categorized in: Adult, Antidepressants, Antipsychotics, Anxiety, Bipolar, Blogs, Depression, Disorders, Mood Stabilizers, Non-Drug Approaches, Psychiatric Drugs, Recovery/Empowerment, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders

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 …
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June 2, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

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 …
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May 25, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

Update on the Star*D Report

Two months ago, I wrote a post about a New Yorker article that reported that 67% of the depressed patients in the STAR*D trial “recovered.” As I noted in that post, the 67% figure was a highly exaggerated number. Only …
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May 19, 2010 | Categorized in: Adult, Antidepressants, Blogs, Depression, Disorders, Psychiatric Drugs

A Schizophrenia Mystery Solved?

One of the enduring mysteries in schizophrenia research circles has been the disparity in outcomes between schizophrenia patients in “developing countries” and those in “developed” countries. The mystery arose in 1979 when World Health Organization investigators announced that, in a …
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May 8, 2010 | Categorized in: Adult, Antipsychotics, Blogs, Disorders, Psychiatric Drugs, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders

Time Magazine and Anatomy of an Epidemic

As I expected, Anatomy of an Epidemic is turning out to be a controversial book. A nice review in New Scientist magazine, a thrashing in the Boston Globe (see earlier posts), and now a good review in Time magazine. It’s …
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April 24, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

Hypotheses, Scientific Evidence, and On Being Compared to an AIDS Denier

In today’s Boston Globe (April 14), Dr. Dennis Rosen, a pediatric lung and sleep specialist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, reviews my new book, Anatomy of an Epidemic. He also posted this review on his Psychology Today blog. I am actually …
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April 14, 2010 | Categorized in: ADHD, Adult, Anxiety, Bipolar, Bipolar, Blogs, Children and Adolescents, Depression, Depression, Disorders, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders

Story-Telling in the Age of Corporate Medicine (or more on being called an AIDS denier)

As a journalist, I long have been fascinated by reporting on the storytelling forces within American medicine that create societal understanding of the merits of its treatments. I write about this in my new book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, and …
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April 13, 2010 | Categorized in: Blogs

Fact Checking the New Yorker, Part Two

In his March 1 article in the New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote that the NIMH’s STAR*D trial showed that antidepressants produced a 67% recovery rate, which was “far better than the rate for placebo.” As I noted in a previous …
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March 15, 2010 | Categorized in: Adult, Antidepressants, Blogs, Depression, Disorders, Psychiatric Drugs

Fact Checking the New Yorker

In the March 1 issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand surveyed the topsy-turvy world of treatments for depression, writing in part of the conflicting evidence regarding the efficacy of antidepressants. The strongest evidence for the drugs, he suggested, came …
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March 15, 2010 | Categorized in: Adult, Antidepressants, Blogs, Depression, Disorders, Psychiatric Drugs