Tag: Robert Whitaker

Mad in Brasil presents the tenth edition of its annual international seminar, The Psychiatric Drug Epidemic.

Robert Whitaker appears on the From Trauma to Joy podcast hosted by Mac. Bob joins the podcast to discuss his books and his observations...

Robert Whitaker keynote at the Deutscher Psychotherapie Kongress (German Psychological Association), Berlin, June 2026.

Robert Whitaker appears on the Third Wave podcast. "What if some of the assumptions behind long-term SSRI prescribing were never as settled as most of...

Robert Whitaker appears on the Psychophobia podcast hosted by Dr. Michael Montgomery. Watch Part 2 here. Watch Part 1 here. "Stevie Nicks lost her creativity, her zest...

Robert Whitaker appears on the Psychophobia podcast hosted by Dr. Michael Montgomery. Watch the interview here. "The former head of the American Psychiatric Association once called...

In our first podcast of 2026, Robert Whitaker joins us to answer questions submitted by Mad in America readers and listeners. We discuss the validity of ADHD diagnoses, withdrawal and sexual dysfunction risks of SSRI antidepressants, the harms of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), the rise of AI-generated misinformation and much more.

Katinka Newman interviews Robert Whitaker for the Med Free Mental Fitness podcast.

On the Mad in America podcast this week we have Robert Whitaker with us to answer questions sent in by readers and listeners.

For our 200th podcast interview, we are joined by members of MIA staff to reflect on Mad in America's mission and work over the last decade.

A dialogue between Nev Jones and Sandy Steingard about Mad in America, critics of psychiatry, medication for psychosis, Open Dialogue, and the need for racial and class justice.

The Vice article was presented as an exploration of the “movement against psychiatry,” and yet you can see, once it is deconstructed, how it told a story that surely pleased the promoters of the conventional narrative, and put the “critics” on the defensive at almost every turn.

After a meta-analysis of RCTs of antidepressants was published in Lancet, psychiatry stated that it proved that "antidepressants" work. However, effectiveness studies of real-world patients reveal the opposite: the medications increase the likelihood that patients will become chronically depressed, and disabled by the disorder.

In a recently published commentary in Psychiatric Times, Ronald Pies and Joseph Pierre made this assertion: Only clinicians, with an expertise in assessing the research literature, should be weighing in on the topic of the efficacy of psychiatric drugs. They wrote their commentary shortly after I had published on madinamerica “The Case Against Antipsychotics,” and it was clear they had me in their crosshairs.

Long-term treatment with antipsychotic drugs is currently considered the standard treatment for patients diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia.’ A new study challenges this practice, however. The...

This review of the scientific literature, stretching across six decades, makes the case that antipsychotics, over the long-term, do more harm than good. The drugs lower recovery rates and worsen functional outcomes over longer periods of time.

While there has been a recent push to account for financial conflicts of interest in medical research, less attention has been paid to organizations...

Following up on the responses to his talk criticizing “skeptics,” science journalist John Horgan defends the work of Robert Whitaker and Anatomy of an...

Scientific American journalist John Horgan criticizes self-identified “Skeptics” for focusing on easy targets and ignoring the failings of modern science and medicine. Among his...

In the past six years, I have had the opportunity to speak at several conferences or meetings that I felt had particular potential to stir some political activity that would challenge current psychiatric practices, and one of those events was the meeting convened in the U.K.’s Parliament on May 11th, which had this title for the day: Rising Prescriptions, Rising Mental Health Disability: Is There a Link?

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence is meeting today, May 11th, to discuss evidence of the link between the rise in disability...

The producers of “Healing Voices” ­‐ a new social action documentary about mental health ­‐ are releasing the film via community screening partners in...

“Do they make people less aggressive? Yes, sometimes they do. Will they sedate people? Absolutely. Will they make kids easier to manage? They will,” Robert Whitaker tells Liz Spikol for Philadelphia Magazine. “But I know of no study that shows that medicating these kids long-term will help them grow up and thrive. The developing brain is a very delicate thing. The narrative is that these side effects are mild, and that’s just not true, and that the benefits are well-established, and so often they’re not.”

When I wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic, one of my foremost hopes was that it would prompt mainstream researchers to revisit the scientific literature. Was there evidence that any class of psychiatric medications—antipsychotics, antidepressants, stimulants, benzodiazepines, and so forth—provided a long-term benefit? Now epidemiologists at Columbia University and City College of New York have reported that they have done such an investigation about antipsychotics, and their bottom-line finding can be summed up in this way: Psychiatry’s “evidence base” for long-term use of these drugs does not exist.

Researchers from the City College of New York and Columbia University published a study this month testing the hypothesis that people diagnosed with schizophrenia treated long-term with antipsychotic drugs have worse outcomes than patients with no exposure to these drugs. They concluded that there is not a sufficient evidence base for the standard practice of long-term use of antipsychotic medications.