Last spring, it seemed certain that the story of the STAR*D scandal, which Mad in America has been reporting on for 14 years, would finally attract the attention of the mainstream media. All of the ingredients for a blockbuster article were now clearly visible, including an acknowledgement from inside psychiatry that this story was of profound importance for all of our society.

Yet, the media has remained silent, and now the scandal is fading away. American psychiatry has weathered the crisis; it will not have to confront a public stunned by news of how the oft-cited 67% cumulative remission rate, in the “largest and longest study ever done to evaluate depression treatment,” was born of scientific misconduct. Instead, that finding will remain in the literature, evidence that can be cited by the media and by the field of the effectiveness of antidepressants.

As such, the scandal now serves as a historical verdict on the ethics of American psychiatry, and by extension, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). As for the mainstream media, this is a story of how it utterly failed the public, cowed into silence by a medical discipline that, for decades, has used the media to promote a narrative that privileges its guild interests but is belied by its own science.

Here is a recap of this scandal, and the harm done.

The Story That Was Told to the Public

When the NIMH launched the $35 million STAR*D study, it promised that the results would be rapidly disseminated and used to guide clinical care. It was well known that industry-funded trials of antidepressants used inclusion-exclusion criteria to select patients most likely to respond well to the drug, and that because of such criteria, 60% to 90% of real-world patients didn’t qualify for such studies. The STAR*D study would be conducted in real-world patients, which is why it would be of such prime importance.

“Given the dearth of controlled data (in real-world patients groups), results should have substantial public health and scientific significance, since they are obtained in representative participant groups/settings, using clinical management tools that can easily be applied in daily practice,” the STAR*D investigators wrote.

The STAR*D trial provided patients with up to four tries of finding an antidepressant or combination of antidepressants that worked. If a first antidepressant hadn’t led to a remission at the end of 12 weeks, then a second antidepressant could be tried for another 12 weeks, and so on, through four levels of treatment. Whenever a patient was found to have remitted at the end of one of the treatment periods, the patient was whisked into a year-long follow-up study to see if the remission could be sustained.

In 2006, the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) published four reports on STAR*D outcomes. Three told of remission rates after the first and second stages of the study, and then in November of that year it published a summary of outcomes from the trial. The abstract in the summary report told of a therapeutic success:

“The QIDS-SR16 remission rates were 36.8%, 30.6%, 13.7%, and 13.0% for the first, second, third, and fourth acute treatment steps, respectively. The overall cumulative remission rate was 67%.”

The NIMH stayed true to its promise to rapidly disseminate the study findings, trumpeting the good news in a press release. “Over the course of all four levels, almost 70 percent of those who didn’t withdraw from the study became symptom free.”

This “nearly 70%” figure was the bottom-line result from this landmark study, and in the years that followed, the STAR*D investigators and other leaders in American psychiatry published scores of papers touting the 67% remission rate, with graphics like the one below summarizing the outcomes.

Source: Gaynes, et al. “What Did STAR*D Teach Us? Results from a Large-scale, Practical, Clinical Trial for Patients with Depression.” Psychiatric Services 60 (2009):1439-1445.

The clinical protocol was clear: If the first drug didn’t work, try a second, and if a second didn’t work, try a third or a combination of drugs, and if that didn’t work, try yet again with another antidepressant. Nearly 70% of real-world patients could expect to become “symptom free” with this use of antidepressants.

Deconstructing the Study

While the November 2006 report told of a therapeutic success, readers who were familiar with the STAR*D articles published earlier that year, telling of the results from the first and second treatment levels, could see that something was amiss with this chain of publications. Most notably, the stated number of eligible patients had changed with every publication, from a high of 4,041 to a low of 2,876. The authors also switched from using the HAM-D as the principal instrument to assess the stage one remissions to an instrument called QIDS in the November article, without any explanation for why they had done so.

Moreover, while the abstract of the November report told of a cumulative remission rate of 67%, the discussion section of the paper revealed that this was, in part, a made-up number. The researchers had theorized that if those who had dropped out had remained in the study through all four stages of treatment, they would have remitted at the same rate as those who hadn’t dropped out, and they added these imagined remissions to their tally of patients who had gotten well. Without these imaginary remissions, the reported remission rate in the November 2006 paper would have been around 50%.

There was one other red flag. The paper did not disclose the sustained remission rate at the end of the one-year follow-up. How many of those who had remitted had stayed well? All that the STAR*D investigators wrote was that relapse rates during the follow-up were higher for those who had taken multiple tries to remit. They did publish a graphic which purported to tell of the survival rate for the 1,518 patients who entered the follow-up trial, but as there was no discussion of how to read the graphic, it was impossible to make sense of the numbers.

 

While these red flags were present in the November 2006 article, any lasting questioning of the STAR*D results would likely have disappeared if it weren’t for the dogged investigative work of psychologist Ed Pigott. He could see something wasn’t right, and once he had obtained a copy of the STAR*D protocol through a freedom of information (FOI) request, he and his colleagues, starting with a paper published in 2009, were able to detail the ways that the STAR*D investigators had deviated from the protocol to inflate their published remission rates.

In a 2010 paper, Pigott and colleagues also made sense of the graphic representing the one-year results. Of the 4,041 patients who entered the trial, only 108 had remitted and then stayed well and in the study to its one-year end, a documented stay-well rate of 3%. All of the others had either never remitted, remitted and then relapsed, or dropped out of the study. This was an outcome that was quite at odds with the 67% “cumulative remission rate” being touted to the public as evidence of the effectiveness of antidepressants.

Mad in America’s review of Pigott’s 2010 paper was titled: “The STAR*D Scandal: A New Paper Sums It All Up.” In 2011, Pigott published a paper titled “STAR*D: A Tale and Trail of Bias,” which laid out the protocol violations in detail, and Mad in America posted the documents that he had obtained through his FOI requests. The public now had easy access to source documents that told of how the STAR*D investigators had deviated from the protocol to produce their inflated 67% remission rate.

Pigott and colleagues published articles in 2015 and 2018 on the STAR*D trial, and each time Mad in America reviewed the articles. In our 2015 book Psychiatry Under the Influence, Lisa Cosgrove and I wrote about the STAR*D scandal in depth, as it served as an example of the “institutional corruption” in psychiatry due to pharmaceutical interests and psychiatry’s own guild interests.

Yet, even as Pigott and colleagues published their findings in peer-reviewed journals, the mainstream media remained silent about this challenge to the STAR*D findings. Instead, mainstream media outlets, such as The New Yorker, cited STAR*D as evidence of the efficacy of antidepressants. As far as I can tell, the only exception to this media silence was when Medscape reported on Pigott’s 2010 paper, its report confirming that the 3% stay-well rate was accurate.

Although there were writers, such as Bruce Levine, who wrote about the STAR*D on other online media sites, such as CounterPunch, the mainstream media remained silent. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and on and on: Pigott’s deconstruction of the study, while well known to Mad in America readers, did not find its way into any major publications.

The RIAT Reanalysis

In 2019, Pigott and his colleague Jay Amsterdam, who is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at UPENN, obtained access to the patient-level data from the STAR*D trial through the Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials initiative (RIAT). This initiative had been established in 2013 to enable researchers to reanalyze data sets from publicly funded trials, particularly when there was reason to think that the initial results may have been incorrectly reported. The other members of their team were Thomas Kim, Colin Xu, and Irving Kirsch.

A RIAT reanalysis meant that their published findings would carry a societal stamp of approval for correcting the research record. Pigott and colleagues could now go through the case reports for each of the 4,041 patients enrolled into the study and assess their progress through the study: their baseline HAM-D scores, whether their HAM-D scores showed them to be in remission at the end of one of the stages of treatment, and whether they had dropped out before remitting. They could compile these outcomes based on following the protocol for doing so.

The STAR*D investigators, in their November 2006 report, had stated that 67% of the patients had remitted by the end of all four levels of treatment (2,460/3,671). In an article published in BMJ Open in August of 2023, Pigott and colleagues found that if the protocol had been followed, 1,089 of 3,110 patients would have been reported as having remitted after all four stages of treatment (35%).

Moreover, with access to patient-level data, Pigott and were able to publish a precise count of how each of three protocol violations had been used by the STAR*D investigators to inflate the remission rate.

  1. There were 607 patients enrolled into the trial who weren’t depressed enough to be eligible for the trial (the study required a baseline HAM-D score of 14 or higher), and another 324 who lacked a baseline score. In their initial report on remissions after the first stage of treatment, the STAR*D investigators had rightfully noted that these 931 patients didn’t meet eligibility criteria, and thus weren’t “evaluable” patients. However, the STAR*D investigators snuck this group of 931 back into their count of remissions when they reported level two results, and they continued to include this group as “evaluable” patients when they published their cumulative remission rate in November 2006. This added 570 to their tally of remitted patients.
  2. The protocol stated that the HAM-D would be used to assess remissions. At clinic visits, the clinicians would also administer an unblinded tool, the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QIDS), to assess how patients were doing, and since the study was meant to mimic real-world care, this instrument would be used to assess whether dosages should be altered and whether other medications—such as sleep medications—should be prescribed. The protocol explicitly stated that “research outcomes are not collected at the clinic,” and thus the QIDS would not be used as an outcomes instrument. However, in their November 2006 report, the STAR*D investigators used the QIDS scores to report remission rates, omitting any mention of HAM-D scores. This switch to an unblinded instrument, one that was not supposed to be used to report research outcomes, added 195 to the count of remitted patients.
  3. Although the study protocol was silent on how dropouts would be counted, a 2004 article by the STAR-D investigators stated that patients with missing HAM-D scores at the end of each treatment step were “assumed to not have a remission,” meaning that they were to be chalked up as treatment failures. Instead, as noted above, the STAR*D investigators theorized that if the dropouts had stayed in the study through all four levels of treatment, they would have remitted at the same rate as those who did stay in the study. This thought experiment, which turned “treatment failures” into remitters, added another 606 to their count of remitted patients.

With these three protocol violations (and one other lesser one), the STAR*D investigators changed the remission equation from 1,089/3,110 (35%) into an equation of 2,460/3,671, a remission rate of 67%. The protocol violations added 1,371 to the count of remitters, meaning that 56% of the remissions came from these deceptions.

The Media Remain Silent

In September of 2023, MIA published a long report titled “The STAR*D Scandal: Scientific Misconduct on a Grand Scale.” We also put up a petition on change.org calling for the AJP to retract the 2006 paper. While AJP editor-in-chief Ned Kalin ignored our petition, which had been signed by more than 2000 people, it seemed to strike a nerve, and in December the AJP published a commentary by John Rush, the principal investigator of the STAR*D study, and four of his colleagues, that sought to defend the integrity of their November 2006 article.

Their reply to Pigott and colleagues, arrogant in tone, revealed an utter disregard for truth.

The most egregious violation that Pigott and colleagues had identified was that the STAR*D investigators had counted remissions in the group of 931 patients who lacked a baseline HAM-D score, or who weren’t depressed enough, based on their HAM-D score, to qualify for the study. As the STAR*D investigators had acknowledged in their report on stage one outcomes, this group were not “evaluable” patients. Yet, in their commentary, titled “The STAR*D Data Remain Strong: Reply to Pigott et al.,” the STAR*D investigators accused Pigott and colleagues of applying “post-hoc criteria” to wrongfully remove these patients from their reanalysis of remissions.

They wrote:

“The analytic approach taken by Pigott et al has significant methodological flaws . . . in total, 941 patients included in our original analyses were eliminated from Pigott et al’s reanalyses based on their post-hoc criteria. The rationale for removing these participants from the longitudinal analysis appears to reflect a studious misunderstanding of the aims of the Rush et al. paper, with the resulting large difference in remission rates most likely the result of exclusion by Pigott et al. of hundreds of patients with low symptoms scores at the time of study exit.”

And:

“Effectiveness trials by design aim to be more inclusive and more representative of the real world than efficacy trials. By removing the data of over 900 study participants from their reanalyses, Pigott et al failed to recognize the purpose of inclusiveness. It appears that the authors created rules to define post hoc which subjects to include, which eliminated many subjects who experienced large improvements during one or another of the study’s levels.  By doing so, the sample is biased to underestimate the actual remission rates.”

And still more:

“It appears that [Pigott et al] created rules to define post hoc which subjects to include.”

The AJP, by publishing this commentary, had now added its name to the scandal. Pigott and colleagues had specifically calculated outcomes according to the protocol—this was the whole point of their RIAT reanalysis—and so the AJP was now presenting to its readers an accusation that was obviously false. Rush and colleagues, together with the AJP, apparently were counting on AJP readers to be so lacking in curiosity that they would not bother to read the Pigott paper, or, even if they had, to be so primed to discount challenges to their profession that they would just assume the STAR*D authors—key opinion leaders in their field of depression—must be telling the truth.

At the same time, for those who had read Pigott’s paper and understood its RIAT-defined methodology, it was evident that the STAR*D investigators could not provide an honest explanation to defend the integrity of their November 2006 paper. Instead, they had made up this “post hoc” accusation in an effort to impugn the credibility of Pigott and colleagues. This would seem to meet the legal criteria for libel, given that both the STAR*D authors and the AJP knew that Pigott and colleagues had done no such thing.

However, the fact that Rush and colleagues published their letter was a sign that public disclosure of the scandal was gaining some momentum. Shortly after their commentary appeared in the AJP, the Psychiatric Times published a cover story on Pigott’s paper. It was titled “STAR*D Dethroned?” and subheaded “Since 2006, STAR*D stands out as an icon guiding treatment decisions of major depressive disorder. But what if it is broken?” This was the moment that it seemed surely the media silence would break.

In his essay, Psychiatric Times editor John Miller neatly laid out the impact STAR*D had on psychiatry. “For us in psychiatry, if the BMJ authors are correct, this is a huge setback, as all of the publications and policy decisions based on the STAR*D findings that became clinical dogma since 2006 will need to be reviewed, revisited, and possibly retracted,” he wrote.

At this point, all of the ingredients for a blockbuster story were in place. This was an acknowledgement from within psychiatry that it was urgent that psychiatry investigate Pigott’s reanalysis, and that if it held up, it would be evident that prescribers of antidepressants, and all of American society, had been grievously misled by the STAR*D investigators, with much societal harm done as a result.

With Psychiatric Times having weighed in, multiple people sent emails to editors at major newspapers telling of this unfolding scandal, urging them to cover the story. And if the media needed any additional reason to cover the story, it came in March 2024, when psychiatrists Nicolas Badre and Jason Compton published a letter in Psychiatric Times titled “STAR*D: It’s Time to Atone and Retract.” They laid out in detail the ethical imperative that the field of psychiatry now faced.

“The impact of STAR*D was outstanding; it is highly cited in our textbooks . . . Some may think finding that antidepressants are effective in 67% of patients is trivial; however, the efficacy of antidepressants was not as widely accepted prior to STAR*D. The saturation of psychiatric textbook with STAR*D, more than ever before, solidified that teaching.”

And:

“It is our opinion that the importance of STAR*D and its ramifications for the field of psychiatry are too serious to be dismissed. STAR*D is too cited and used too often to justify current prescribing practices.

“The esteem held by our field in the age of modern medicine rests on the validity of our scientific pursuits. The direction our field has historically taken too often followed the dictates of dogma rather than evidence. We should not continue to make this mistake.

“Even beyond the academic realm, psychiatry has faced more scrutiny from the public than any other medical field. Some of this criticism has been unjustified, but much of it has been well earned. The best defense of our field in this arena seems to rest in holding ourselves to the highest standards of integrity.

“Lastly, and most importantly, we have an ethical duty to our patients to take an honest look at the evidence derived from our research when making decisions that will impact their mental health. Our patients, our field, and our integrity demand a better explanation of what happened in STAR*D than what has thus been provided. Short of this, the best remaining course to take is a retraction.”

The story was all lined up for the media, with documents neatly in a row: the original 2006 report with the red flags that could now be identified; the dogged pursuit of the “truth” by Ed Pigott; the RIAT reanalysis published in a prestigious journal that identified the protocol violations the STAR*D investigators had employed to grossly inflate the remission rate; the letter by Rush and colleagues defending their work that could easily be shown to lack credibility; and finally the Psychiatric Times story that told of the extraordinary impact the STAR* study had on prescribing practices. There was a list of people to interview, and when it came to fleshing out the harm done, reporters could interview patients who had been prescribed antidepressants since 2006 and ask them: would they have made a different decision about their use if they had known the true STAR*D results, including the 3% stay-well rate at the end of one year?

Yet, even though editors at major newspapers were contacted, and Pigott and Amsterdam had interactions with a reporter or two, the months ticked by, and no articles about the STAR*D scandal appeared in the mainstream media. And with each passing month of silence, the possibility that the general public would ever learn about this scandal began to fade away.

This past October, Pigott and colleagues sent a letter to AJP editor Ned Kalin, detailing the “scientific errors” present in the November 2006 article that told of a 67% remission rate, and calling for the article to be retracted. Given that it was coming from the authors of the reanalysis, this retraction request provided the media yet another possible news hook for the story.

Mad in America published a copy of their retraction letter, but the media silence continued. Kalin did not respond to their letter, and so, given that nearly 18 months have passed since Pigott and colleagues published their RIAT reanalysis, it now appears that news of this scandal is never going to break out of the Mad in America “ghetto,” which is to say that while it is well known to our readers, it will remain unknown by the general public.

Pigott, Amsterdam, and colleagues are continuing their analysis of the patient-level data in the STAR*D study, looking at claims made by the STAR*D investigators in other articles they published, and their ongoing work is certain to expose other aspects of this scandal, such as a failure by STAR*D investigators to report serious adverse effects and drug-induced suicidal ideation. However, it appears unlikely that such future reports will stir the mainstream media into action, given that the blatant scientific misconduct revealed by their RIAT reanalysis failed to do so.

As such, it appears that American psychiatry is going to weather the crisis and avoid having to answer to the public for its scientific misconduct and its promotion of a false 67% remission rate to the public. Instead, the 67% remission rate will remain in the research literature, ready to be cited by the media in articles about the merits of antidepressants.

Indeed, on December 10, The New York Times,  in an article titled “7 Things Everyone Should Know About Antidepressants,” told readers yet again that “a large study of multiple antidepressants found that half of the participants had improved after using either the first or second medication that they tried, and nearly 70 percent of people had become symptom-free by the fourth antidepressant.”

Such was the news that TheNew York Times found fit to print.

A Defining Challenge to American Psychiatry

This scandal presented American psychiatry, and by extension the NIMH, an existential challenge, one that would define their relationship to society. Would American psychiatry do the right thing and investigate whether the November 2006 report on the STAR*D outcomes should be retracted?

That was all that John Miller and the Psychiatric Times were demanding of the American Journal of Psychiatry and the “field” of psychiatry. Launch a public investigation into this matter and determine whether the article should be retracted.

The standards for retracting an article in a medical journal are clear. A  2011 article on retraction in a medical journal noted the following:

“Articles may be retracted when their findings are no longer considered trustworthy due to scientific misconduct or error, they plagiarize previously published work, or they are found to violate ethical guidelines. . .  Although retractions are relatively rare, the retraction process is essential for correcting the literature and maintaining trust in the scientific process.”

This case met that standard. The 67% remission rate published in the AJP in November 2006 could no longer be “considered trustworthy due to scientific misconduct.” Retraction of the article was “essential for correcting the literature and maintaining trust in the scientific process.”

Moreover, the World Association of Medical Editors, in its “Professional Code of Conduct,” specifically states that “editors should correct or retract publications as needed to ensure the integrity of the scientific record and pursue any allegations of misconduct relating to the research, the reviewer, or editor until the matter is resolved.”

Finally, it is evident that this is a story of research fraud. There is an obvious intent to deceive that is present: the inclusion of 931 who weren’t eligible for the trial in the tally of remissions isn’t an instance of an unwitting scientific mistake, but rather this group of ineligible patients was snuck back into the list of evaluable patients in order to inflate the cumulative remission rate. The switch from using the HAM-D to assess remission rates to the QIDS instrument, which the protocol explicitly states would not be used to assess outcomes, is another clear example of an intent to deceive.

There are three primary categories of research misconduct—fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism—and this is an instance of “falsification” of results, as opposed to “fabrication” of data. Falsification is defined as “manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record.”

The letter by Badre and Compton, titled “STAR*D: It’s Time to Atone and Retract,” best summed up the ethical challenge that was presented to American psychiatry by the RIAT reanalysis. The key word they used was “atone,” which, of course, has a meaning that derives from Biblical scriptures. In the Bible, atonement, as one online definition states, is the “process of fixing relationships that have been broken by wrongdoing. It’s a prominent concept in both Judaism and Christianity, where it refers to the idea that humans must atone for their sins against God.”

In the case of STAR*D, the falsification of results could be seen as a “sin” against the standards of science, which impaired the “relationship” between a medical profession and the public it is supposed to serve. Badre and Compton were asserting that in the absence of a compelling explanation by the STAR*D investigators for their protocol violations, the field, in order to repair its relationship to the public, needed to confess to their falsification of data and retract the study so that it no longer stained the evidence base for antidepressants.

There Will Be No Atonement

While the STAR*D scandal may seem like a “one-off” instance of falsification, it can be best described as a galling chapter in a larger story of American psychiatry failing to fulfill its duty to be a faithful communicator of scientific findings to the American public. This has been particularly true in terms of its communications to the public about depression and the merits of antidepressants.

This ongoing failure can be traced back to the publication of DSM-III in 1980, when American psychiatry adopted a “disease” model for categorizing and treating mental disorders. At that time, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) launched a public relations campaign to sell this new model to the public (an effort that was funded in large part by pharmaceutical companies). The public was informed that research had shown that mental disorders were diseases of the brain, and there was reason to think they were due to chemical imbalances. We were told that psychiatric drugs fixed those chemical imbalances, like insulin for diabetes.

This was a story of a great medical advance. The second-generation SSRI antidepressants, starting with Prozac’s introduction into the market in 1988, were hailed as breakthrough medications, as were the second-generation “atypical” antipsychotics. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical money flowed to the APA to promote this disease model, and flowed to academic psychiatrists who served as their “key opinion leaders” (KOLs).

The American public organized its thinking and use of psychiatric services around this narrative of a great medical advance. The diagnosing of depression and other mental disorders increased dramatically, and so too the prescribing of psychiatric drugs. Spending on psychiatric drugs in the United States rose from around $800 million in 1987 to nearly $40 billion 20 years later.

This was the governing public narrative when the STAR*D trial was conducted. In 2005, a year before the STAR*D reports appeared, the APA published a press release telling how a survey had found that “75 percent of consumers believe that mental illnesses are usually caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.” This, said APA president Steven Sharfstein, was evidence of “good news for [public] understanding of mental health.” A psychiatrist, the press release noted, was a “specialist specifically trained to diagnose and treat chemical imbalances.”

That same year, the APA published a “Let’s Talk Facts About Depression” brochure, which delivered the same message: “Antidepressants may be prescribed to correct imbalances in the levels of chemicals in the brain.”

However, while American psychiatry was informing the public of the wonders of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, the scientific literature was telling a very different story about the merits of the “disease” model of care. Specifically, researchers were failing to find evidence that people diagnosed with major mental disorders suffered from a chemical imbalance; psychiatric drugs, rather than fix known chemical imbalances, were instead found to induce abnormalities in neurotransmitter function; and NIMH studies were telling of poor long-term outcomes.

In the case of antidepressants, a search of the scientific literature—literature published prior to 2006—had this story to tell:

  • In 1984, the NIMH reported that a study of depressed patients had failed to find evidence that a lesion in the serotonergic system was a primary cause of depression. This was the first of many such failures, and the third edition of the APA’s Textbook of Psychiatry, published in 1999, acknowledged this fact, writing that decades of research “has not confirmed the monoamine depletion hypothesis” (serotonin is a monoamine). In 2005, Kenneth Kendler, editor-in-chief of Psychological Medicine, wrote that “We have hunted for big simple neurochemical explanations for psychiatric disorders and not found them.”
  • Prior to the introduction of antidepressants, depression was understood to run an episodic course. However, epidemiological studies in the 1980s found that depression was now running a more chronic course, which led at least a few to worry that antidepressants were causing a chronification of the disease. In 1994, Italian psychiatrist Giovanni Fava wrote: “Antidepressant drugs in depression might be beneficial in the short term, but worsen the progression of the disease in the long-term, by increasing the biochemical vulnerability to depression . . . Use of antidepressant drugs may propel the illness to a more malignant and treatment unresponsive course.”
  • As our society embraced the use of SSRI antidepressants, disability due to affective disorders dramatically increased. One reason for this was that SSRIs were found to increase the risk that a person with unipolar depression would suffer a manic episode and be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis with a much less favorable prognosis. Indeed, a 1995 NIMH study that tracked the outcomes of medicated and unmedicated depressed people over a period of six years found that those who were “treated” for the illness were three times more likely than the untreated group to suffer a “cessation” of their “principal social role” and nearly seven times more likely to become “incapacitated.”

  • Prior to the STAR*D study, the NIMH had funded two small studies that provided a comparison of one-year outcomes for medicated and unmedicated “real-world” patients. In a study of 118 outpatients given the best possible clinical care, only 26% responded to the antidepressant during the first year of treatment (meaning that their symptoms decreased by at least 50% on a rating scale), and only about half of that group had a “sustained response.” Only 6% of the patients saw their depression fully remit and stay away during the year-long study. Meanwhile, in a study of 84 patients of unmedicated depression, 85% of the patients had recovered by the end of one year. These two NIMH studies provide results that were polar opposites: a 6% recovery rate for those treated with antidepressants, and an 85% recovery rate for those who eschewed the drugs.

That record of science provided reason to predict that the STAR*D outcomes would be poor and add to the worry that antidepressants, over the longer term, increased the likelihood that medicated depression would run a chronic course. That was indeed what the RIAT reanalysis of the patient-level data showed: only a 35% remission rate after four levels of treatment, and only a small handful of the 4,041 who entered the trial enjoying a sustained remission at the end of one year.

However, the STAR*D investigators were invested in the narrative that told of how antidepressants were an effective treatment. This was the narrative their guild had promoted, and they also had extensive ties to the pharmaceutical companies that sold antidepressants, serving as their KOLs. The 12 STAR*D authors listed a collective total of 151 ties to pharmaceutical companies. Eight of the 12 had ties to Forest, the maker of Celexa, the study drug given in the first stage of the study.

Rather than report findings that would undercut the public narrative of progress, the STAR*D investigators saved that narrative, and even provided a stronger foundation for it, by reporting that nearly 70% had become “symptom free” at the end of the four stages of treatment. They also hid the one-year results, and provided no information about the serious adverse events that the patients may have experienced (although such information was, in fact, collected during the study). As a result, the lone “evidenced-based” soundbite to emerge from the study was the “nearly 70%” remission rate.

As Badre and Compton suggested in their letter, the RIAT reanalysis actually provided psychiatry with an opportunity to “atone” for its past sins, including the falsification of outcomes in the STAR*D study. As they wrote, psychiatry had “an ethical duty to our patients to take an honest look at the evidence derived from our research when making decisions that will impact their mental health,” and if, in response to the RIAT reanalysis, the AJP, the APA, and the NIMH had launched an investigation into this matter, and made their investigation known to the public, that would have served as evidence that the field was, as it moved forward, fulfilling that “ethical duty to take an honest look at the evidence derived from our research.”

But expecting that to happen was like whistling in the wind.

We now can see that American psychiatry has chosen not to grab that opportunity, and instead has chosen to continue on the path it has been on for more than 40 years, privileging its guild interests over its “ethical duty” to the public. This choice be seen in the letter published by the STAR*D investigators, which falsely accused Pigott and colleagues of applying “post-hoc criteria” to reduce their count of cumulative remissions, and in the fact that AJP editor-in-chief Ned Kalin did not even bother to respond to the letter from Pigott and Amsterdam requesting that the November 2006 article—and other STAR*D articles—be retracted.

That is what we can now conclude: The falsified results will remain in the literature, and there will be no atonement for the field’s sins.

The Media Fails Us Too

While it may seem difficult to understand the media’s silence, given the documentation that exists telling of the STAR*D scandal, there is a history that can help explain it. The reticence of the media to report on outcomes that threaten guild interests is not new, and its roots can be found in a strategy adopted by the pharmaceutical industry and its thought leaders more than 30 years ago.

After it published DSM-III, the APA understood that it needed to court the media to promote its disease model. It did so in multiple ways, regularly holding “media days” to tell of the field’s advances in understanding the biology of mental disorders, and handing out awards to media that published stories telling of such advances. In 1988, Eli Lilly brought to Prozac to market, and soon the media was hailing it as a breakthrough medication, telling of how it fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain. The pill even appeared on magazine covers.

However, Eli Lilly—and by extension, American psychiatry—soon faced a public relations crisis. In clinical trials, Prozac had been shown to stir suicidal and violent thoughts in a significant number of patients, and by 1990, so many people had suffered a bad reaction to Prozac that a Prozac Survivors Support Group had formed. Many harmed by the drug had taken their complaints to lawyers, and in the summer of that year, one lawsuit in particular caught the public’s attention. Five weeks after starting Prozac, Joseph Wesbecker walked into a Louisiana printing plant where he worked and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing eight and wounding 12. Victims of the shooting and their families sued Eli Lilly, and suddenly the “breakthrough” sheen around Prozac was in jeopardy.

Then Eli Lilly got the break it needed. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which was affiliated with Scientology, issued a press release urging Congress to ban this “killer drug,” and Eli Lilly quickly pounced, as they now had a method to discredit this worry. “These lawsuits are being drummed up by the Scientology group, which has a history of criticizing the use of psychiatric drugs,” it said.

Eli Lilly honed a four-point message for the media. This was an issue being raised by Scientologists; extensive clinical trials had shown Prozac to be safe and effective; the suicidal and homicidal events were due to the disease and not the drug; and people who could be helped are being scared away from treatment by such criticisms, and that was the real public menace. Eli Lilly ran media-training sessions for the academic psychiatrists it paid to be their thought leaders, having them practice their delivery of this message.

This strategy immediately paid dividends for Eli Lilly. An article in The Wall Street Journal informed readers that Scientology was a “quasi-religious/business/paramilitary organization” that was “waging war on psychiatry,” and that it had attacked Prozac’s safety “even though doctors unaffiliated with Eli Lilly had found, during the clinical trials, that there was a lower tendency toward suicidal thinking with Prozac than with other antidepressants, or with the starch capsules given to a control group.”

This PR strategy had proven remarkably successful, and it became a model for psychiatry and its KOLs to adopt as they responded in the media to critics. The critics were Scientologists (or else were maligned as “flat earthers” or some other term that delegitimized their criticism), and any media outlet airing such criticisms was being irresponsible by publishing such criticisms, as it could discourage the public from getting helpful treatment. A responsible media would turn to academic psychiatrists as the experts who could be trusted to properly inform the public about the merits of psychiatric drugs.

The KOLs—and American psychiatry—could expect that this argument would protect their guild interests. Reporters who covered “health” were expected to interview the “experts” for their stories, and this meant turning to academic psychiatrists for quotes and explanations about research findings. Health reporters and their editors at mainstream media took to heart the message from the KOLs that to report on stories that questioned the efficacy of psychiatric drugs was irresponsible, as they were giving credence to critics who were biased and motivated by a hostility towards psychiatry.

In short, more than 30 years ago, the pharmaceutical companies and American psychiatry adopted a PR strategy to delegitimize critiques of the narrative of progress that they were telling the public. This was a strategy that, in essence, cowed the mainstream media, making it afraid to do its own investigations of the scientific literature.

The media’s silence about the RIAT reanalysis reflects that institutional timidity. The authors of the STAR*D study are the experts that mainstream media turn to when they report on the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs, and while the Psychiatric Times did open up the possibility that major print media would report on this scandal, it is now apparent that even that opening was not enough to overcome that institutional timidity.

Or to put it another way, American psychiatry has successfully made mainstream media its handmaiden, and in this instance, that has led to a failure of epic dimensions.

Harm Done

The harm done to the American public by the falsification of the STAR*D results is this: Our society has been denied informed consent about the merits of these drugs, and if it were not for the falsification of the STAR*D results, our societal use of these drugs would likely have been much more restrained.

On an individual level, those who decided to take an antidepressant following the publication of the STAR*D reports did so with the understanding that research had shown that two-thirds of patients so treated got completely well, their symptoms gone. While many may tell of how antidepressants improved their lives, there are also thousands who tell of how these drugs ruined their lives.

They tell of having gone manic on an SSRI and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder; of sexual dysfunction; of tardive dysphoria (an enduring form of depression); of a painful form of agitation known as akathisia; of horrible withdrawal symptoms when they try to taper from antidepressants; and of persistent nervous system injury that remains even after they have withdrawn from the medications. And these patients, who have fared poorly on antidepressants, regularly tell of how they were informed they had a chemical imbalance and given little information about the possible hazards of long-term use.

The story of the STAR*D scandal reveals that multiple institutions have failed the American public. Given the importance that the STAR*D study has had on the prescribing of antidepressants, the American Journal of Psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association, and the NIMH all had a duty to make the RIAT reanalysis known to the public.

So too all of American medicine. The majority of prescriptions for antidepressants are written by general practitioners. BMJ Open is a general interest medical journal, and one would hope that other medical journals, in their editorials, would have commented on the Pigott re-analysis, and urged an investigation into the STAR*D study, given its profound impact on prescribing practices. The medical field as a whole has a duty to protect its evidence base from being soiled by the “falsification” of results, but to my knowledge, there has not been any clamor from other medical journals about this scandal, in the “largest and longest” study of antidepressants ever conducted.

That is the conclusion to be drawn from a review of the STAR*D scandal. American psychiatry, the NIMH, the larger medical community, and mainstream media . . . all can be seen as having betrayed the American public by failing to make this scandal known.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

69 COMMENTS

  1. Re the STAR*D scandal: ” The Public was Betrayed, Millions were Harmed, and the Mainstream Media Failed Us All” says someone who instead of understanding reality and having realistic expectations, expected a different result and therefore feels betrayed, and wants to blame someone, in this case the mainstream media. You did great work in uncovering the full historical facts about what we call ‘mental illness’ and psychopharmacological outcomes through a forensic search of all the literature, and this was an enormous contribution not just to the field of critical psychiatry but was also an enormous contribution to the victims of psychiatric violence and potentially also to the broader self-understanding of society, at least in limited circles. But everything you have done beyond this work has been limited by your social conditioning and assumptions, as you repeat your error of taking for granted the lies of psychiatry in every other domain within society, including the media and law and medicine more broadly. Let me explain more simply. If you had faith in the mainstream media in the first place, then it wasn’t the media that betrayed you. Rather, the intelligence of your brain was betrayed by your abject blindness about your actual social reality.

    An intelligent and accurate critical description of society or the media is not blaming society or the media – it’s exposing what is: it’s description, or ‘explanation’ of what is born of understanding. It is this work you need to undertake, and there is no research literature that will help you understand the social reality which is the whole problem limiting any progress not just in the field of what you call ‘mental health’ but in all the grave human and environmental problems that are destroying the whole world today. Blaming is proof you don’t understand, and blaming the media or psychiatry or any part is proof of incomplete understanding, because we blame only when we don’t understand. If we understand we don’t need to blame – we can instead explain.

    There is no blame in understanding – just seeing what is as it is, and responding honestly and intelligently to it. Blame is the only thing in the universe that is blameworthy. Scientists and serious people concerned with the truth never blame do they. The scientist doesn’t blame the atom or the cell or the organs, even if the body in question committed murder. It follows what is as it is and conveys it to another. As soon as blame creeps in you betray the limits of your understanding but enjoy a certain illusory sense of moral righteousness while you do so. I’m afraid it is this that betrays the public more then anything else in the field of critique of psychiatry. The critic of psychiatry needs to criticize themselves and their obvious impotence in order to go beyond this limit, to break through. Blaming the media reduces our otherwise important arguments to the level of the most depraved and unintelligent politicians, or for that matter, all of which blame the media (and anyone else it’s convenient to blame) as do the equally most depraved and unintelligent celebrities accused of something unflattering by the media. Do you want to join this club or transform blame into true apprehension of what actually is taking place, i.e. a true understanding of what is? Otherwise, if you’re going to just blame the media instead, you may as well quip “fake news” like your orange haired emperor (and you secretly know that any old orange haired orangutang would make a better POTUS).

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    • As one who hopes the US will some day use common sense, and take direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising off the mainstream media (we’re one of only two nations on the planet who unwisely allow it). I have to agree with Whitaker, on his belief the mainstream media is a part of the problem.

      Since all of big Pharma’s illegal (false advertising is illegal) advertising has resulted in ”the public” being “betrayed” – and even deluded by psychiatry’s “BS” DSM – and “millions” have been “harmed.”

      Thank you, Robert, as always, for your truth telling.

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  3. “Moreover, while the abstract of the November report told of a cumulative remission rate of 67%, the discussion section of the paper revealed that this was, in part, a made-up number. The researchers had theorized that if those who had dropped out had remained in the study through all four stages of treatment, they would have remitted at the same rate as those who hadn’t dropped out, and they added these imagined remissions to their tally of patients who had gotten well. Without these imaginary remissions, the reported remission rate in the November 2006 paper would have been around 50%.”

    I had to read this three times before I realized that remission means it gets better, rather than the other, added to this, when it supposedly wouldn’t have gotten better, given the….. then it’s what they say got better, and being better (According to them( is actually worse……

    It’s kind of hard to read a statement when the word “remission” means the opposite, and you know this from experience, but are still supposed to actually read it for what it’s meant to mean, when it’s wrong…..

    “In a 2010 paper, Pigott and colleagues also made sense of the graphic representing the one-year results. Of the 4,041 patients who entered the trial, only 108 had remitted and then stayed well and in the study to its one-year end, a documented stay-well rate of 3%. All of the others had either never remitted, remitted and then relapsed, or dropped out of the study. This was an outcome that was quite at odds with the 67% “cumulative remission rate” being touted to the public as evidence of the effectiveness of antidepressants.”

    Of those who dropped out, how much got better, it’s like more than 3% or not?

    It becomes something what THIS MUCH effort it put into what doesn’t work, even exposing that it doesn’t work then becomes more reticulating in order to make out: “see, someone doesn’t like us, they will always rebel, we’re right because those good for nothings don’t like it….”

    Anybody that gets upset about being lied to is of course…..

    Note, I didn’t know what reticulating meant when putting it in above statement, I had a “psychotic” impulse to believe that something whose meaning I didn’t consciously know had pertinence, I allowed my uncontrolled psychotic impulses to make me think that I could just put that word in and look it up later, to see WHY I had heard it out of nowhere, not negating that something heard in my mind, when I didn’t consciously know what it meant and thus was unconstructed thought by the conscious mind, should be discarded as non reality based:

    Reticulate, definition according to “Oxford languages” is: “divide or mark (something) in such a way as to resemble a net or network.
    “the numerous canals and branches of the river reticulate the flat alluvial plain”

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    • There was interaction that this comment was difficult to understand, which I understand. So, I add…..

      I heard this word in my mind: “reticulating,” whose meaning I didn’t know, but put it in knowing it would be descriptive, then had to look it up (if it wasn’t pertinent I would have removed it from my word processor file where I kept this comment). And so made a remark how this could be seen as “schizophrenic,” that I didn’t check myself. In order to point out the amount of thought we’re supposed to edit from being expressed because of such diagnosis. It also was hard to read the word “remitting,” used in a fashion which seems to be more about hiding that there wasn’t remission, so was in reality was the opposite. I had to three times read those statements before I realized I was giving the word on the screen an opposite meaning, while knew what remission meant, my mind having put it as meaning the opposite, while I KNEW consciously what it meant, the whole time it being used in a way that in reality…..

      In my life, because things that really were going on, and actually happened involving psychic input, and that even when it showed I was seeing things before they happened, that I couldn’t talk about this, I couldn’t process this, and was “diagnosed,” which I’ve seen with others like me, as well. And it’s something Peter Breggin says about “schizophrenia,” you’ve had quite a few people on this site with articles stating similar things. Just about everyone read fictional novels, knows fairy tales, etc. but this isn’t considered harboring tendencies towards “schizophrenia” !?

      Whether it’s simple stuff a person can’t process they are going through, and the fictional “non reality based” stuff they need to believe to allow it to be fictions, whether it’s this or whether it’s beyond that, and spiritual energy…….. there just might be something going on that functional rather than a disease.

      I’ve never been diagnosed as being depressed, haven’t even had any “friends” go on interventions regarding me life, but then I’m supposed to be socially backwards or something like that, so I don’t have such hanging on around me with badges. The level at which a person is supposed to go on as if being sad in an unhealthy situation is a disease, as if nothing is going on to cause the reaction but a chemical imbalance they can’t prove… as being confused in a situation so confusing that one NEEDS to have perspective in an inner world and the logical response for this is called “non reality based” because same as fiction it has meaning when allowed to express a perspective on life (or beyond that involves senses that aren’t relating to the physical but to a spiritual source), or one can’t “concentrate” and reproduce data that’s really more an attempt to brainwash a person, again would a health perspective be given, or that the environment in itself doesn’t induce the ability to concentrate, or that a person isn’t interested nor really in the long run needs to be. Thus 
      Schizophrenia, Depression ADHD and what else, that we are supposed to put in a jail cell saying they are malevolent things, when the whole process of them being accused of such isn’t really all that logical or founded perhaps, if at all..… is just to hide what? What if they were free to express themselves, or “God forbid” encouraged to for reasons of enlightenment or perspective…..

      Locking everyone up who isn’t fearful of something, is this going to make everyone else fearful of it, regardless of whether there’s a reason to allow some freedom instead rather than fear?

      Why is fear so worshiped? Be scared of yourself, you have a disease. Isn’t that mind control 101, make people believe they are under attack?

      And you maintain a society where fear is a necessary ingredient for deterrent, and fear is instilled through trauma, whether it’s the penal system, the medical system, wallstreet and the paycheck, grades in school, religions going on about Hell or who knows what (militaries with enough weaponry to kill all human life on the planet more than 20 times over to make sure the enemy would be dead in what’s called overkill), people are going to be so controlled by fear, they don’t know what it is to be human anymore and basic impulses of compassion are made out to be a disease and ANYTHING out of the box is “crazy”……and you have these people called “sociopaths,” running so much of the system, because YOU believed you needed people able to use fear to control human behavior, and THAT is where it leads.

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  4. Once again, a truly brilliant summary by Mr. Whitaker of the pervasive corruption, incompetence, and apathy characteristic of the psychiatric establishment and its venal enablers not only in the mass media but other institutions as well. But what else is one to expect from a society whose fundamental value system is wholly conditioned by crass commercialism and commodification of human relations?
    Unless and until that value system undergoes a radical transformation (perhaps through an economic collapse or some other unforeseeable disaster), the racket known as the mental health field will continue its duplicitous harmful practices at the expense of unwary clients (victims).

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  6. I was waiting for a sign (like this) from Robert Whitaker!
    I’d just read (from December 21, 2023):
    “At the end of each year, I like to ask this question of ourselves: Are we fulfilling our mission?”
    – https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/12/2023-in-review-a-paradigm-shift-is-underway/
    And at the end of 2024 it was silent.

    However, has there ever been a response to this ?

    https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/radar-trial-a-reality-check-for-critics

    (except for Dr. Moncrieff herself. i.e.:
    https://joannamoncrieff.com/2023/10/02/lessons-from-the-radar-trial/)

    I hope this will be addressed sometime soon!

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  7. Most histories of medicine provide a typical Whig history describing slow, but steady progress from the four humors to the germ theory. David Wootton’s “Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates” is the exception; he points out that most medicine prior to the 20th century was unhealthy. Medicine’s penchant for bloodletting proved doctors immune to facts.

    But psychiatry’s history was entirely separate from medicine, arising from the establishment of large public asylums like the Parisian “General Hospitals” described in Foucault’s “History of Madness” and the English private madhouses depicted in Parry-Jones’ “Trade in Lunacy.”

    Though Pinel was falsely credited with “liberating” the insane, the French revolution did preserve the asylums it was supposed to abolish; it turned their administration over to doctors who would decide who would go in and out. And doctors of course had to claim that they were treating the sick and diseased.

    Psychiatry was born two centuries ago with the lie that it was a medical enterprise with the claim that people who differed from social norms had biological or genetic causes. For this reason, Thomas Szasz has titled one of his books, “Psychiatry: The Science of Lies.”

    Psychiatry is the worm in the apple of modern medicine. In 200 years it has failed to prove that any “mental illness” has a biological or genetic origin.

    It is long overdue for medicine to form a commission to examine the false claims of psychiatry and to expel it from the profession. Such a “Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism” was successful in confronting the false medical claims of Franz Anton Mesmer in Paris (1784).

    Since the “mental health movement” has become America’s public religion, the press hires reporters who are true believers and ignores or quashes any dissenting views as “mad.”

    Kudos to Bob Whitaker and “Mad in America” for their heresy. Let us hope it spreads.

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  9. Thanks for this thorough and powerful summary. It does indeed highlight themes that are widespread through – indeed, fundamental to the success of – psychiatric theory and practice.

    The figures of 3% ‘remitted’ at one year, suggest that antidepressant treatment is not only failing to help people – it is actually making them worse. It is estimated that ‘untreated’ depression lifts of its own accord by six months in about 50% of cases. Presumably that figure would be higher at 12 months. This is the other side of the scandal, as ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ showed.

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    • In the 1970s, the leading American experts in mood disorders, including Dean Schuyler, head of the depression section at the NIMH, told of how “spontaneous recovery rates” in depression exceeded 50% within a few months, and the one-year recovery rate for patients hospitalized with depression was said to be around 85%. When Posternak published his study of 85 unmedicated patients that found a one-year remission rate of 85%, he specifically noted that this was consistent with Emil Kraepelin’s research showing an 85% recovery rate for patients hospitalized with depression.

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      • Not that I want to discount Robert Whitaker’s amazingly articulate research, at all. I probably would have rolled my eyes long ago and thought: WTF!? and stopped trying to even decipher people’s own goings on and dismissed it as nonsense. Seriously, I’m not trying to discount at all Robert Whitaker’s amazing input, it’s just look, see, what one has to resort to to even respond to what’s going on. Like: WOW!

        This is where we are with this merry go round, to try to convince people making the 93% mark in not healing people (unless one takes 33% after they don’t follow their own machinery of how it’s done), in order to make out what they said was a disease was a disease. Look heh, they are making this “disease” worse. We can point to before this more “medical” method it was 15% weren’t “healed”. NOW it’s 93%. But we are still going on about “a disease.”

        What if a society defined someone not wanting to go to church, given that most people in that society are brainwashed regarding the afterlife being infinite eternal torture would they not, and this is then a disease, and subject to one of the two cures? In one case you have 93% not cured, although it’s made out to be 33% by various more than questionable means…. And in the other it’s 15% not cured. Does this still make it in either case a legit disease, and somehow, I don’t see that Dean Schuyler and certainly not Kraepelin (who “defined” “schizophrenia”) as people who are going to by now have necessarily stopped the whole biological method from making the 93% mark in their attempt to make whatever out to be a disease. What about the 15%? And what are we really going on about? What if they defined say a sprained ankle as a disease, had convinced society of who knows what, such people end up in a “medical” situation, and WOW only 15% aren’t healed….. Somehow, to me that 15% hospitalized for “depression” don’t remit doesn’t speak for THAT method being so amazing, although yeah, this isn’t 97%. WHICH method shows, heh, this isn’t working, and WHY is this not acknowledged!? If you go back to the older method it’s 15% don’t remiss, but was it ever a disease as diagnosed, and what about the 15%? And was that even really accurate?

        When people with guns come and invade your land, steal it away from you, and your whole culture is suppressed, the very belief system that nurtured the genes that grow your amazing body, if this causes “depression,” it’s seen as a disease. And then global warming wouldn’t be going on were such beliefs honored, something affecting the whole planet, unless you want to rig or suppress results to make out this isn’t going on, all sorts of diseases from pollution etc. etc. A society more and more mechanized and looking for stimulant from consumerism, and what one gets from causing global warming and polluting the planet, which is seen as some sort of gain, despite what it might do to future generations. Look see: “Although suicide was infrequent among North American Indigenous tribes prior to colonization, their suicide and suicide-related behaviors (e.g., ideation, suicide planning, and suicide attempts) have become a major public health concern.” https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-23063-016 From one frantic Internet search.

        That’s just one example also, of such “definitions,” used just like that. Now it’s “medical.” WTF!?

        I’m not even saying that this isn’t a challenge to find that, heh, there’s still something there worth wanting to live, beyond all of them making happiness out to be what they stole. God still exists, perhaps. Maybe you have a spirit that nothing can destroy, that’s part of forever, and allowing that rather than sadness, or anger, or even trying to push sadness or anger away as if it’s a disease, and instead just feeling it, that this isn’t more than what your ego says you need……allowing the sadness, seeing it as a natural response might invoke natural intelligence and find solutions…..

        Or not being able to get a good looking boyfriend to go to the prom: there used to be advertisement all over the TV, which I think is before the Internet so much, that social anxiety or insecurity can be “cured” by “antidepressants.” And then you had these amazing bubbles in the Prozac commercial (does Prozak with a C look better, as Prozac, rather than “Prozak”) which treat this unproven chemical imbalance, which the APA couldn’t validate but tried to say there was proof by saying academic books that prove the opposite, that there is no proof contain this proof (although they still maintain what has been proven to not be scientifically verifiable treatment is how you treat, although it’s still made out to be scientific), or they maintain a stance going on about statistical based norms which defines poverty, minority status or living in a war zone as a disease: “https://mindfreedom.org/kb/2003/”

        If you don’t have enough money to buy fashionable clothes, but the medical establishment will have your insurance fix you up with their antidepressant. What about selling the Brooklyn bridge to make people think they own something whether it’s there’s or whether it truly exists, as long as they don’t check whether it is or can be theirs for real? Does this PROVE poverty is a disease!?

        But EXCUSE me WTF!?

        If I see this as a disease, this method making it out such has 85 success rate (if I see it as a disease), it then gets worse when it’s dealt with more “scientifically”, according to those who don’t follow science, the success rate actually adds up to 3% “scientifically” when you bend the rules that being scientific means just saying you are, but not following the rules…… and then it’s 67, which is still less than 85, although following the rules shows it’s 3%?

        NOTE this is not some surrealistic exercise using a random generation of numbers……. Neither does it seem to be an attempt at being a humorous portrayal of CORRUPTION by making numbers out they are LEGITIMATE results…

        And I’m REALLY not trying to dehumanize anyone that is having difficulty with depression, by ridiculing them… it’s just, perhaps there’s another way, and this way leads towards healing. Maybe not being so scared to try something out of the box might help……

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        • Here https://mindfreedom.org/kb/2003/ is the link for the article from mindfreedom pointing out that 1)They didn’t have true proof of a chemical imbalance then, and still don’t we can see now. That to prove this, they make reference to textbooks which say “medications” are a treatment, although the same textbooks say there is not proof the medications treat chemical imbalances. This was supposed to suffice as proof there’s a chemical imbalance, although the textbooks do the opposite. I don’t know whether the textbooks actually state how psychiatric medications CAUSE scientifically chemical imbalance that wasn’t there before, or that this is made out to be a cure of what they cause, because it disables the mind, although in the long term there’s then more of the problem. We are dealing with academics and how they are funded, but THEN already the very textbooks disprove the point the APA was trying to prove, but still the APA said the opposite.

          Then, they went on about an increasing problem, again ignoring that they were scientifically condoning causing chemical imbalance (and it’s short term suppression of symptoms), as what needs to happen, rather than what statistics and science showed, in that it was part of the cause of the rise in the problem. And they stated terms like someone not conforming to statistical based norms, as being significant as something medical, rather than it is a sociological construct that also could define minority status, poverty, living in a war zone, etc.

          And sorry, I had to mend this paragraph below, I’ve mended the holes with what’s inbetween the []’s… Sorry I hadn’t meditated yet, and all of this is like some sort of assault with confusion technique. AI makes this out of confusion technique: “The confusion technique is a hypnosis strategy that uses a series of contradictory suggestions to confuse and disorient the subject. The goal is to put the subject in a state of cognitive overload, which makes them more receptive to suggestions and more likely to enter a trance. ” , How is what’s going on here confusion technique? One way is it’s where assumptions are thrown at you, such as “common treatment is how something healed, if there’s a problem THAT is how you must treat it, because that’s what the authorities said to do to heal,” while disregarding the true science and statistics, and presenting instead the minority that would make out the benefit, or society would make out the benefit, while backing this up with not only corrupt statistics, but corrupted scientific statements. Or simply that something that is a normal response to life, and is actually part of natural intelligence is made out to be a disease, and one can only address the statistics of how a supposed treatment of it as a disease, that that isn’t working and causing problems [only if one lists it as a disease, regardless of whether it truly is], regardless of whether one is going on about a legit disease, to begin with. Or simply overloading someone with stuff that takes more scrutiny than one is capable of, one doesn’t know how to go about, scrutiny that is met with all sort of attempts at being made invalid or assaulted with ways it doesn’t meet any of the strongly held brainwashed assumptions people have been indoctrinated with, when people aren’t going to check their brainwashing, but assault one with more of what they don’t dare to question, as if you’re undermining their safety, when again you are doing the opposite given any perspective. And they know certain ideas have been brainwashed into the public at large, and anyone questioning said presumptions is going to be met with a mob mentality, and so they, maintaining such assumptions, start throwing all of those assumptions at you, as if they are true, even when they know they aren’t, just to make you feel overloaded…… “confusion technique”

          My mending of the paragraph from the comment this is a reply to, because I noticed my mind was starting to become QUITE overloaded:

          And then you had these amazing bubbles in the Prozac commercial (does Prozak with a C look better, as Prozac, rather than “Prozak”) which treat this unproven chemical imbalance, which the APA couldn’t validate but tried to say there was proof by saying academic books that prove the opposite [that when they state there’s no proof that a chemical imbalance is being treated, this can be ignored when the book states that psychiatric drugs are treatment, even thought they have been proven to cause chemical imbalance], that [when] there is no proof contain[ed in] this proof [it is still proof because saying that a book which lists treatment based on proof that is said to exist but doesn’t is proof, even though the same book actually states there IS no proof] (although they still maintain what has been proven to not be scientifically verifiable treatment is how you treat, although it’s still made out to be scientific [when it hasn’t been made out to be scientific, but listing this as treatment means there is proof, regardless that there is no proof), or they maintain a stance going on about statistical based norms which defines poverty, minority status or living in a war zone as a disease: “https://mindfreedom.org/kb/2003/”

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      • “Kraepelin” is the one that defined “schizophrenia” condoning the investment in “treatments” that ruined the lives of say Camille Claudelle, albeit further defining what she went through as a disease, when I wouldn’t think so, and know that heals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Claudel  even wikipedia seems to agree with me on points. And then Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide rather than be reinstitutionalized…… Or then Alan Turing, Kraepelin saw homsexuality as a disease, as well: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18175635/ And I’m mentioning those two, Woolf and Turing, because how they resonated with my life, during my years of healing, and were there…..  there IS something beyond all of that…..

        This is where we’re at, using the statistics of someone who defined homosexuality as a disease, when his condoned treatment of “depression” has more remission than…..

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      • The research is clear – and? You’ll be preaching to the wind until you penetrate into the bigger picture. The social process is one total process, and psychiatry/psychopharmacology is just one branch of a greater and much graver disease. It is this total disease that is important – trying to reform the epiphenomena is like trying to plaster up the leaves of a diseased tree. Understanding the total disease will radicalize and direct you until witch time you’re preaching to the converted or eminently convertible alone, which in the era of Trump and conspiracy theories is shrinkingly few. Facing the full truth of the utter hopelessness will radicalize you and it is this radicalization that will generate true hope and direction. Facing the full truth doesn’t destroy you or threaten your stability. If you don’t believe me ask MLK.

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  10. Thank you.
    I think the scandal is deeper than Star D and the media.

    It’s not how well the pharmaceuticals work, but how many are harmed. Those that are harmed – simply don’t matter. I guess under the notion that the good, outweighs the bad. But by now, this has gone on for decades, and the number of those that have been harmed (or outright killed) by pharmaceuticals is huge. Change is in the air. This extends throughout the health care industry – I’ve even had a dermatologist deny side effects of a pharmaceutical clearly printed on the FDA handout. I’m not stupid, and neither are most people. Without trust – the health care industry has nothing.

    Benzo’s – per the FDA Warning of 2008 – kill (by suicide) half of one percent of the patients (0.05%) – most likely blamed on mental illness of the dead patient. Given the huge quantities of prescriptions written every year – this is 60,000 people. 60,000 people who simply don’t matter to the liability obsessed health care industry.

    They very nearly killed me. Thanks to MIA and its ongoing good work, I took a flyer that it was the drug (benzo’s). I quit them. It was the drug. I am one of the half of one percent. I am free, and healthy once again – 7 years and counting. Thank you Mr Whitaker for your life’s work. It saved my life, when the health care industry would have killed me (without remorse).

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  11. This is corruption of global dimensions.
    Perhaps we need to tool up and get hold of some motivated sabre-toothed lawyers to get stuck in on our behalf.
    There are surely more than a few of them who may have noticed that not only do the pills not work but they also come with debilitating central effects and withdrawal problems.
    The hale ish is Mental,as we say in Scotland…..1 million on a/ds according to ‘The Times’.

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    • I agree with your comment, but can you imagine the formidable uphill struggle that would need to be waged against the mental health industry and especially Big Pharma, which can spend untold billions of dollars to protect their guild interests? Do you really expect the mainstream media to champion our cause?
      Sorry for the pessimism, but barring a total economic collapse, I personally see little hope of rooting out the corruption that pervades every major institution in this corporate fascist entity masquerading as a free enterprise democracy.

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    • It is very doubtful any lawyer will touch this.

      Why? Because psychiatrists do the state’s dirty work with full legal protection, and the state will not allow that power to be jeopardised by inconvenient legal challenge.

      It’s an open secret in the medico-legal world that psychiatry is routinely abused for nonclincial purposes.

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  12. I believe much of the research conducted in psychiatry is fraudulent. Once the STAR*D trial reports are retracted from journals, it will be a wake-up call to review other psychiatric studies critically. The medical community should unite to ban psychiatry. Psychiatry is causing significant harm to medicine, and as a Neurologist, I find this unacceptable. It’s 2025, all the physicians from different specialties should unite and ban this Pseudoscience Psychiatry!! We can do it my fellow physicians. Let’s ban Psychiatry!

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    • Agreed, but considering the untold numbers of people who’ve been seriously harmed over many decades by neurotoxins, psychosurgery, and ECT (whose terrible effects are routinely ignored or minimized), shouldn’t psychiatrists as well as their venal, acquiescent enablers in the media, academia, so-called regulatory agencies, and other institutions be held accountable for widespread fraud, complicity, and documented harm? Banning is a necessary but not sufficient step to effect meaningful change.

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      • Excellent distinctions, Joel, the breadth of institutional complicity is staggeringly wide and deep; the reasons of which are both structurally and historically complex and politically prohibitive to reform. Though I am not a believer in the powers of legislative deliverance, I believe laws requiring scientific integrity are of dire necessity, specifically as a means to hold scientism and or willful institutional lies in real time accountability. But, unfortunately, the US congress is at the core of the very problem such laws would address; such is the sordid state of our “leadership (PMC) class…

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  14. Thanks, Mr. Whitaker.
    This summation is significant intellectual support for my still recovering body & soul following 12 years of intentional addiction and it’s damages, in the Psychiatric netherworld.

    As I’ve shared in MIA (& apologies for the repitition), I was diagnosed with Lifetime Bipolar Disorder for being worried about money & unable to sleep in 2004.
    Lifetime bipolar disorder was deemed by Pharma to be the diagnosis-du-jour (for decades, ha)…and Psychiatry vigorously employed the tactics to fulfill the strategy…Lifetime appointments, lifetime drug-sales…becoming a Lifetime revenue stream. Pure economics.

    I was diagnosed, heavily drugged, addicted, & damaged…for 12 years.

    I got out with a canceled, ‘forever’ SMI certification and changed mental illness diagnosis (Anxiety!) in writing…following an avoidable anaphylactic ADR.

    Interrupting the Arizona Medicaid/AHCCCS community clinic director’s career-arc to the state-contractor’s CMO/VP position (already offered/accepted/current!) with a messy, little scandal was not an obstacle.

    The solution was to agree to my ‘request’- remove (‘cure’) me of their ‘Lifetime Bipolar Diagnosis’ and guide me thru a (2.5 year) withdrawal of psych drugs.

    Consider it done!-go away quietly-no legal action necessary!

    Anaphylaxis was the (economic ‘evidence-based’) ‘cure’ for Lifetime Bipolar Disorder, apparently!
    You betcha.

    It was kept a unique, under-the-radar relationship/secret during the new CMO/VP’s tenure…I was his only patient, meeting ad hoc in ‘borrowed’ offices…never in his executive digs.

    Nothing shouts louder of their commitment to ‘evidence-based science’ than sweeping their ‘treatment’ and their ‘lifetime diagnosis’ into the trash-bin after 9 years…because a sloppy prescriber might disrupt a C-suite promotion… in a $2-billion state mental health budget paradigm.

    My re-entry into life where psychiatric drugs are defined, more than ever, as the ‘medically appropriate’ response to ALL problems is harrowing.

    As I fully disclose all my Medical History to my current doctors, the print-out of 12 years of psychiatric drugs and the documented (hospital records/prescribing-appt.records) side effects, I am consistently met by an astonishing, studied lack of interest.

    I am clearly & universally viewed as potentially litigous, a liability-threat to their insurance. An unwanted customer.

    Yet they ALWAYS include a mental-“wellness” questionnaire with every electronic appointment check-in.

    They just don’t want to address MY history. They certainly would if I had been addicted and harmed by STREET drugs.

    During the years of side-effect associated trips to the ER, I often encountered young (rotation) docs who would be VERY sympathetic regarding the psych-drug damages. Some closed the door for candid talks, some followed-up personally with referrals, some allowed me to ‘prescribe’ for myself…as I knew better how to ‘treat’ the current, idiosyncratic horror.

    Now the entire AMA culture is engaged to build & protect unchallenged economic growth. There is no more talk about their past ‘misgivings’ regarding any real science & psychiatry. They have embraced the cultural wave and given psychiatry the inclusive legitimacy they always, desperately craved.

    Ignoring science, facts, & truth, as the Star-D scandal illustrates, infects ALL aspects of health care.

    As Pharma money (#3 Donor in D.C.) supports the election of ‘lawmakers’, Pharma will always control the culture’s perception of what Mental Health looks like.

    And it is Happy Obedience.

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    • Krista, thank you for your accurate depiction of psychiatry’s many self-protective shenanigans. It’s a foul “profession” through and through.

      I never expected psychiatry to respond any differently to the STAR-D report as psychiatry isn’t about to let the truth tarnish its reputation because doing so would permanently harm its credibility consequently leaving it open to too many lawsuits it might have a hard a time winning.

      Here’s the truth I challenge anyone to disprove: psychiatry is run like an old boys club because that’s exactly what it is and will remain so because gaslighting is its main tactic, like every other old boys club.

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      • As ever you are absolutely correct Birdsong. Hoping the new year finds you well and thriving despite what you have endured. Looking forward to reading your posts. The truth will set us free..now a dead concept.. But sadly no one is interested in the TRUTH as demonstrated by this entire article.

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        • Thank you, K. You are very kind.

          It’s sad the way so many so-called “leaders in psychiatry” seem more interested in protecting their turf than honoring the truth. But this doesn’t stop me from believing Mr. Whitaker’s devotion to the truth will continue making freedom possible for many more people enslaved by psychiatry.

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  16. Thanks again to Robert Whitaker! Zombified by psychiatric drugs prescribed for treatment of bipolar disorder, I lost fifteen years of my life. But it wasn’t until I read Whitaker’s books that I understood that I was by no means alone. This knowledge gave me the courage and moral fortitude to speak out against psychiatric and pharmaceutical abuse. My journey has led me on a lonely path of discovery and wellness. Now at ninety years of age I have celebrated over twenty years of no mood swings using light and dark treatments (chronotherapy) and no drugs. My new book explains why these treatments work. Recent advances in paleogenetics and anthropology have validated my theory. Hold onto your seats: Bipolar disorder is a hibernation cycle of behaviors we inherited from Neanderthal. Crazy? Yes, and crazy enough to be true. Read my forthcoming book: The Neanderthal-Human Hybrid is Us: Bipolar Disorder, A Behavioral Fossil.
    Julia A. Sherman Ph.D.

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  17. I am retired now, but I had a medical hypnotherapy practice in Canada for 26 years. Almost all my clients had been on psychiatric drugs…one on 26 at one time. I worked with several veterans, all of whom had been on 6-12 drugs at one time.

    People need to realize that these parasite fake doctors have turned every natural, logical, reasonable reaction to life’s circumstances into a problem. Even childhood is a disease.

    They don’t want us to react to their destruction of humanity, so we must allow ourselves to be slowly killed off, poisoned, starved, treated like commodities and if we get angry and react naturally, the courts will force us to be ‘treated’ by the parasites. Sexually abused and neglected children are fed drugs to keep them quiet.

    I had a 96% success rate in (a) resolving the underlying (non-brain injury) issue, no matter the psychiatric diagnosis (b) helping them wean off the meds very, very slowly, (c) helping them back to work and rebuilding their relationships and (d) getting their libido back.

    I was referred many patients from psychiatrists, including the then Chief of Psychiatry at the Psychiatric Hospital in Ottawa. They all recovered, went drug free and several tore a strip off their psychiatrists for torturing them.

    In many cases, the side effect of the brain damage was tardive dyskinesia and those resolved with a homeopathic detox remedy and nutritional regime provided by Dr. Vladimir Topalo of Surrey BC.

    We must stop believing experts, and start using our heads.

    Re: schizophrenia. The problem is that the patient is deliberate misled that ‘talking’ in their minds is a disorder. I worked with at least 40 schizophrenics and every single one of them resolved once I told them that everyone can hear themselves think and reason and after they weaned off their meds very slowly.

    The most beautiful thing in the world to see is a schizophrenic who learns that everyone can hear themselves think and further, many of use tend to talk to ourselves. What they needed to know was that it was natural and further, they could choose the topic and what they were thinking easily.

    Psychiatry must be abolished, banned and psychiatrists, especially the ones who have drugged children, must see prison time. The prescribing doctor of any patient who committed suicide or homicide or a crime while on these drugs, must see prison time, and if the patient committed a homicde, they should see the death penalty.

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  18. Hi,

    I read the headline of this article and did not read further …what’s the point?

    There is no outcry because our species want people who are unwanted, distressed, can’t cope – warehoused in some way. It used to be in a lunatic asylum until Reagan and the other neo-libes decided that was too expensive. Now distressed, frightened, angry, atomised people are warehoused by legal drugs and that is written into state law. Even it is is proved that psychiatric treatments are fraudulent, poisonous and damaging – most of our species don’t care because the drugged are being warehoused in some way and not bothering them.

    Once you enter the psychiatric system, you generally undergo an civil death – the modern equivalent of ‘nacht und nebel’ night and fog – as the Germans romantically called it. No one will ever really listen to you again if you are diagnosed with a major ‘mental health disorder’; you become disabled, unemployed and unemployable, impoverished and voiceless.

    The ones that remain, the ones that thrive – are happy to have things that way – the warehousing occasionally interferes in their lives – homeless people begging or defecating near their neighbourhoods – but the richer group gate themselves away from that.

    Nothing will change because those in power like it that way. Mentally ill people were always regarded as rubbish in Western culture.

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    • Dear maedhbh
      completely agree with you. At the end of the day “no one cares” about those tortured,damaged and dead at the hands of drug dealing psychiatrists. I went into the city at Christmas in one of the wealthiest states in Australia and was talking with a young dude homeless for 13 years, I’ve watched him age and decline over the years – voice hearer thrown out of a wealthy home when he was given THE diagnosis. He has endured rape,assault, enforced treatment,prison, he said exactly that “no one cares what has happened to me K and no one ever will because I’m just a mad person who hears voices”. At the same time he is viewed as a leader and defender by other homeless people because of his fierce compassion for others. The indigenous elders call him White Jesus.
      One morning he had broken his arm after being knocked down by a car. It was hanging in 3 pieces but he wouldn’t go to emergency department because he knew he would be formed under our MH Act and forcibly injected. I persuaded a street doctor to come out and plaster him on the street. Sad but true.. no one cares and no one ever will.
      Hard to reach any other conclusion.
      Good on Robert and others for not giving up against impossible odds and indifference and everyone on here for living, surviving and caring for others in this MIA community. We all know the truth and that is really important.

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      • Thanks for your comment K. What an awful story about that man – you got him help and engaged with him so ‘someone cared’ in that instance.

        In 1968 or the 70’s or even the 80’s they might have made a film about someone like him – ‘Midnight Cowboy’, ‘One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest’ …’The Fisher King’.

        Not now though …now people like that man are represented in TV’s serials as monsters like the zombies in ‘The Walking Dead’ – or the murderous automatons of Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’. They’ve become thinly disguised analogies of what everyone else fears might happen to them.

        I have heard other stories of people from ‘good’ homes who ended up dying on the streets having been put into the psychiatric system.

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      • I would reserve the term “medications” for substances administered to treat genuine illnesses with a demonstrable physical etiology.
        Substances used for suppression of “symptoms” of the arbitrarily concocted mental disorders listed in the DSM are more properly termed “neurotoxins.”
        Dr. Peter Breggin makes this distinction clear in his “Toxic Psychiatry” and “Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry.”

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  19. I take as jaundiced a view of diagnosing or even using the term “mood disorder” as I do of diagnosing or speaking of any “mental disorder.”

    If a doctor told you that you were jaundiced because you suffered from jaundice, you might laugh.

    If one tells you that you are depressed because you suffer from depression, you might already be too depressed or too drugged or too brainwashed to laugh.

    But if only you could, because laughter brings hope, and hope heals!

    “This ongoing failure can be traced back to the publication of DSM-III in 1980, when American psychiatry adopted a “disease” model for categorizing and treating mental disorders. At that time, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) launched a public relations campaign to sell this new model to the public (an effort that was funded in large part by pharmaceutical companies). The public was informed that research had shown that mental disorders were diseases of the brain, and there was reason to think they were due to chemical imbalances. We were told that psychiatric drugs fixed those chemical imbalances, like insulin for diabetes.”

    I believe Robert himself has pointed out that the terms “antidepressant” and “antipsychotic,” modeled as they are on “antibiotic,” are extremely clever, deceptive and misleading?

    But surely no more so and hardly as dangerously so as the terms “mood disorder” and “mental disorder,” and “personality disorder?”

    For there can be and there ARE no “mental disorders.”

    “No behavior or ‘misbehavior’ is or can be a disease,” as Thomas Szasz reminded us: “That’s not what diseases ARE!”

    And it’s not what disorders are, either – even if some rare behaviors may be pathognomonic for certain diseases or disorders.

    The human mind is as the mind is and, left to its own – defensive, surveillant, protective, selfish – devices, and seducing us into believing that it IS us, the mind itself IS The Problem.

    Speaking of bibles:

    “Deny thyself!”

    Surely, Jesus must have been warning us that the mind itself, the egoic mind, the mind when not observed and not controlled by our higher selves, IS the whole problem!

    “At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, Oh Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes!”

    And speaking of “Sin:” What once was Original Sin, sinfulness or human suffering has now largely become “mental” and “personality” “disorder,” but is still the same old thing – our lack of self-awareness, consciousness, enlightenment, our ignorance, forgetfulness, ego:

    “They know not what they do!”

    If I thought I only got one crack at life, I think I would and should be extremely depressed for all that I have inflicted on other creatures and on myself, and not only through my omissions, negligence and ignorance.

    “Clinical depression” does not cause hopelessness or feelings of hopelessness: it IS hopelessness.

    How often have I, like other adults, and unlike small children, found myself dragged into arguments about invisible Emperor’s clothes which, in truth, we have not seen?

    (Mind you, I suspect that the severe “post-natal depression” which some women experience in the weeks or months following giving birth – as opposed to that postnatal experience which we all live through – may very well be at least partly symptomatic of real neurological/hormonal changes the elucidation of which may prove tremendously beneficial. If this were not still such a man’s world, or so many men’s worlds, we might long ago have discovered how to prevent such agonies and others which women endure…?)

    Why do we lose hope? Perhaps because we believe our time is limited?

    Is it, though?

    Who knows?

    https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/KtbxLwhGMlDrtZrXqzwtQTktMXjcTktpcL?projector=1

    Apart from everything else, I think that interview reminds me how my own mistakes as well as those of health care professionals can all lead to ultimately joyful outcomes…

    I hope I am no better than any of the greatest fraudsters, bullies and tyrants in history, and no worse than Jesus or Joan of Arc or “Julian” or Hildegard or Teresa, or Meister Eckhart* or Eckhart Tolle or Jung or Bob Whitaker, and this and this alone gives me the greatest hope – that we are and can be equals only as immortals.

    Thank you, Robert Whitaker and MIA, for demonstrating that we humans can accomplish superhuman work, over and over again, and that only witnessing great suffering and great injustice

    Wishing you hope,

    Tom.

    *“My Lord told me a joke. And seeing Him laugh has done more for me than any scripture I will ever read!” ― Meister Eckhart, “Selected Writings.”

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  20. Thank you, Robert Whitaker, not only for the persistent intelligent reporting but particularly (and very importantly) your courage. The ancient Greeks highly prized that virtue in civic duty. Commodification (no “human values” there) fatally biases science and journalism alike, surreptitiously, insidiously corrupting. It’s not simply human life – and we are all fragile, mortal, interdependent – at risk, but the Biosphere itself. Let’s hope scientist’s/journalists take some inspiration from your example.

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  21. Congratulations Bob- An inspiring article to kick of 2025.
    So much of what you have discussed are best summed up by the quote of the former Democratic Party Politician Christopher Dodd who stated –

    “When the public’s right to know is threatened, and when the rights of free speech and free press are at risk, all of the other liberties we hold dear are endangered.”

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  22. Bollocks mate. The thing is we need a total social revolution not a new psychiatry, and we ain’t gonna get either. What we can have is a total revolution within our own consciousness, and in that there is more then a little hope because its easy. Just explode your brain with magic mushrooms and DMT every day until you sound like me. It’s not how I got there although hallucinogens every couple of days for 3 months certainly didn’t hurt. It destroys the outer world and makes the inner world buzz with life like the Amazon rainforest. And then what use is psychiatry? I know there was no point in making this comment but show me a human activity in America that has a point besides taking hallucinogens or smoking weed or being sterilised or euthanised. Robert Whittaker – I beg you to indulge in magic mushroom and ayahuasca and go on psychedelic retreats on every continent and hang out with Native American shamans on rocky outcrops. And then write another book. It’d be the book of books and a best seller that would shatter America and make psychiatric squares rebel and turn right wing mercenaries into flower wielding hippies. So to follow my suggestion would be pure service and more fun then what we’re doing presently isn’t it kanisenit (it was a forklift driver).

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  23. Thank you, Mr.Whitaker, for all your hard work.

    Personally, I think psychiatry should somehow be abolished. In the USA, most psych drug prescriptions are written by non psychiatrists anyway.

    This massive fraud is just part of the problem. Psychiatry is inherently fraudulent because it deals in the so called treatment of fake diseases with real pills and shock and confinement and labels…

    Which results in massive damage to society as a whole.

    I saw a brief video clip once in which the late Szasz, an atheist, calls psychiatry “evil.” I think he’s correct, as usual.

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    • I keep waiting for psychiatry to be kicked out of the medical field entirely, but heaven knows that’s highly likely, at least for a while. However, I imagine it will probably evaporate due to attrition over the next 25 years (or hopefully less) because I also imagine there will be fewer and fewer (self-respecting) medical students willing to have anything to do with psychiatry’s endless drug-pushing madness, and there’ll likely be a good number of lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies for misrepresenting the risks of iatrogenic harm from psychiatric drugs.

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  24. One moral of this story is BEWARE THE EVIDENCE BASE.
    When you look deeper into any mh evidence base, a lot of the claims would not stand up in court. Legal scrutiny, as opposed to scientific scrutiny, appears to be far more stringent. And yet should they not at least be equal, bearing in mind that in the mh industry, we are literally playing with people’s lives. This is why investigative journalists like Robert Whitaker often do a much better job of scrutiny than people within the professions of psychology and psychiatry.
    This is such a comprehensive piece and doesn’t really warrant being made even lengthier, but I did wonder whether maybe a bit missing from this story is the bit about WHY antidepressants aren’t very effective, that they don’t address the roots of people’s difficulties and they are rather weak in relation to the powerful social and material effects of people’s lives.

    Along with all the other reasons for media silence outlined in the paper, maybe this is similar to the silence in the UK about our Post Office scandal. The story only really properly broke when it was dramatized by ITV. Perhaps Robert Whitaker should approach the director, James Strong.

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  25. I have an idea. Universally psyche patients are not believed, right?
    A.I. can vouch for us.
    When our side effects are denied, pull out that phone and ask A. I. “What are the side effects of xxx drug?” (This can be done for free).

    I am free. I had to move to escape the EHR. I have been drug and symptom free for 7 years and counting. It was the drug (benzo’s) causing all the problems.
    But – I am now an old woman. I look like grandma. I am not believed when I warn about cybersecurity (actually, I am a retired software engineer – aerospace).
    But when I tell them that I asked A.I. – I am believed.

    Ageism / sexism … grandma couldn’t possibly know.
    Just an idea, I stumbled upon in the past week. It worked.

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    • Nice to meet you Hope. With a name like that I’m sure you’ve haunted a few psychiatric wards too. Have a nice day, love from Happy Princess Pineapple Features Searching Shopping Malls in LA for Sparkling Helicopter Sneakers and `.o.’ check out the warning sign: don’t shake the hand of a date palm. It’s a crime and it’s in the DSM because it causes infinite harm.

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      • Nice to meet you No-One. Yes “not my first rodeo”.
        I tried my own idea out, on the EHR I left behind in another state.

        When I had told that doctor, via health portal messaging that I did not have Bipolar Disorder – he had come back all liability “I didn’t do it”. He didnt. It happened decades ago. I knew I had to move to another state, to have a chance at equitable healthcare in my old age.

        Instead of a long story, I tried a succinct message:
        Ask A.I.
        Common treatment for chronic headaches?
        Anti- seizure medications
        Common pharmaceuticals whose side effects include suicide?
        Anti-seizure medications
        I was prescribed Klonopin 2002-2017 as needed. I am one of the half of one percent this drug makes suicidal.
        And I attached the 2008 FDA alert (I only found in the Way Back machine)
        I stated it was no one’s fault. They didn’t know, and they didn’t know that they didn’t know. Time marches on. I do not have Bipolar Disorder. It is an mis diagnosis.

        The response? After the 48 hours? Nothing, of course. Corporate Conventional Insurance based health care. But – via messaging – my statement is captured forever.

        The headaches went away when I passed through menopause in 2006 – 18 years ago! A Bipolar misdiagnosis is forever, as are EHR’s. I am way past being angry about this. It is a story of our times.

        Shout out to Sasha and Will Hall – and any other Icarus folks from the first decade of this century. I am known to these folks as Room42. I apologize for my camouflage. I experienced a real life stalker and had to hide.

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  26. Bob, few have sapere aude like you do.

    Thank you for your ability to write, with such clarity from a ‘place’ that is as close [as may be possible] to Robert K Merton’s and Thomas Nagel’s. I refer here to what Science strives for.

    I worked as an NHS psychiatrist for 25 years. I have neither been an academic nor done research.

    The lack of real world scrutiny of STAR*D, by both the scientific community and the wider media should be a concern to all. In the UK, nearly 1 in 4 of the adult population are now taking antidepressants [generally beyond the ‘evidence-based’ period]. This is mass-prescribing.

    In the UK there has been research that considers similar ground to STAR*D: in particular the ANTLER and REDUCE randomised controlled trials. Both studies seem to have lacked in a determination [a polite way of putting it] in doing all that they could, to distinguish withdrawal from antidepressants as relapse. Like STAR*D, the ‘positive results’, then found it easy to be reported by a wide range of mainstream headlines.

    [Duplicate Comment]

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  27. Bob, few have sapere aude like you do.

    Thank you for your ability to write, with such clarity, from a ‘place’ that is as close [as may be possible] to Robert K Merton’s and Thomas Nagel’s. I refer here to what true Science strives for.

    I worked in Scotland as an NHS psychiatrist for 25 years. I have neither been an academic nor done research.

    The lack of real world scrutiny of STAR*D, by both the scientific community and the wider media should be a concern to all. In the UK, nearly 1 in 4 of the adult population are now taking antidepressants [generally beyond the ‘evidence-based’ period]. This is mass-prescribing. There can be no doubt about this.

    In the UK there has been research that has sought to consider similar ground to STAR*D: in particular the ANTLER and REDUCE randomised controlled trials. Both studies seem to have lacked in determination [a polite way of putting it] in doing all that they could do to distinguish antidepressant withdrawal from relapse. Questions asked of the authors of the ANTLER and REDUCE trials have generally brought about defensive responses. Yet, like STAR*D, the ‘positive results’ of these trials, found it easy [uscientifically easy] to be reported in the mainstream headlines.

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  28. My husband & I collaborated with MISSD- a non profit dedicated to spreading awareness about akathisia, on Billboards in Northeast Ohio, on a busy interstate located near many medical facilities- one of them in which, where I was injured with Reglan, after already being harmed by Ativan. We are working on our third Billboard in that area now.

    As far as main stream media goes, I get it. I’m very frustrated too. My husband (my caregiver in all of this) suggests reaching out to Joe Rogan and his podcast. He is VERY aware of how dangerous SSRI and benzodiazepine are. He talks about it on his show frequently. He also had Jordan Pederson as a guest, and Jordan touched on what benzodiazepines did to him. Joe Rogan’s Podcast reaches many many listeners. My husband says Podcasts are the current trend, and they can also lead to mainstream media coverage.

    To read my story on the Ohio Billboard Campaign and press release on Press Wire that we collaborated on with MISSD.co (MISSD Wendy Dolin – in memory of Stewart Dolin advocating akathisia awareness, education and suicide prevention) Please click the link below:

    Direct Link to my Story/Article on Akathisia on MISSD

    website https://missd.co/a-collaborative-campaign-for-awareness/

    Anyway, Joe Rogan Podcast– That’s the ticket.

    Thank you Robert Whitaker for all of your hard work in spreading awareness.
    Shelly & Travis Mayer of Ohio

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  29. Another first rate work of old school investigative journalism by Robert Whitaker. Well…we live in an age where our media and several other institutions defend and normalize a real time genocide, so the issue of wide spread institutional complicity surrounding an antidepressant scandal amounts to scarcely more than faint noise. I for one find the scale and gratuity of complicity of the STAR*D “scandal” depressing-as irony’s go. Maybe I should seek out professional help for being depressed by Robert’s et al work on this subject, and see if I can get some antidepressants for my depression? (Funny, right?) I imagine (literally) taking that tract would garner a psychiatric diagnosis or two-however otherwise entertaining it would be. FWIW, I find Scientology’s role here a dead end given; one that had zero potential to move the needle forward from the gitgo. I’ve sent a link of this article to Democracy Now. Whatever else, journalistic failure is wedded to this scandal, and maybe on that point DN might consider undertaking (from which media might have to “own it”)?

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  31. Again, this is amazing investigative work, and truly conscientious articulate exposing of data that should be exposed. But what is the basic premise? The basic premise is that “depression” is a disease that needs to be treated by medical intervention, and then we have the varying statistics regarding which method has the most remission. And it’s getting worse, but there remains no real articulate perspective on what we’re dealing with, regarding what this is. Is “depression” really a disease that needs medical intervention? What is a “disease” when it’s not medical, which depression hasn’t shown to be at all, so far, in reality, unless you call something medical and then as methods to treat this proceed in time there’s less remission. This is then medical? If we make it worse with our treatment, which we administer by calling it medical, is it then still legitimately a disease when everything gets worse because we called it a disease and keep on calling that while it snow balls into an epidemic? And what does it do to collective consciousness when people believe this label, does it help them understand what’s going on or they more and more paranoid regarding normal responses to life? Are they apt to be scared when they have a response that’s basically normal, and would play itself out with nature, or are they going to become alarmed and be controlled by fear, and end up being vulnerable to suggestion?

    I’ve had two psychologists as parents, and both in ways remained oblivious to understanding the simple relationship there is with parenting, being a parent, and normal emotional interactions with your children. The kind of stuff parents who just are parents do so that their children can feel safe in making themselves vulnerable with their feelings, with their insights, with their thoughts, with their experiences, the simply normal stuff that goes on between human beings heralding what it is to be human. Instead the amount of high level analyzing, and diagnosing, and feeling like one is a hero by glamorizing anyone (well not anyone a specific few, a nice cherry picked group) making a victim out of themselves with a psychodrama…..Normal human interactions that create a healthy environment for emotional health are seen as disruptive, something they didn’t have time for, because they are so busy with psycho-dramas, so busy enabling a vulnerable person’s victimhood and using it as an excuse to not be what any normal parent would be in being what any child needs and in the meantime keeping their clients going round in circles, over analyzing and diagnosing situations, constructing mental labyrinths involving imagery via Von Franz or Jung or the other whose name I can’t remember, and building up castles in the air, this is glorified, and the people exploiting the vulnerabilities of others to attach to such philosophical, academic of “scientific” constructs when they are desperate for answers, they are made out to be superhumans. Although my parents never put me in an asylum, never had me forced drugged, but when I really needed someone to simply listen, and this lead to what it would lead with anyone, they then said they were worried about me becoming ward of the state. This AFTER, all I did was express what went on in my life that I couldn’t talk about, and my father threatened to call the police would I not shut up. This whole “societal” melange of diagnosis that say a person is disabled, they could use that as an excuse to not be parents, same as society denies what’s really going on, and social constructs the same as what define poverty or minority status these are then diseases making out that a person’s responses are signs of a disease, rather than cause and effect that might even determine what kind of a society it is, rather than what kind of a person it is. My mother had a client whose partner was a psychiatrist, who then had me diagnosed, actually filled with ideas that I thought something was going on that hadn’t been, when in reality all my mother or the psychiatrist would have to have done is as the neighbor lady, and she would have said the same thing she told me regarding what I’m not going to mention here. Again, just convenient dismissal regarding whether their diagnosis of their son was accurate or not, just avoid finding out whether what he’s going on about, and knew was going to happen beforehand really did. And it’s really scary realizing people are THAT locked up, and their basic ideas of what happens and what doesn’t is disabled. I for example thought I could talk to this psychiatrist, and she’d be able to listen, see that what had happened had happened, be professional regarding actually listening without prior disabling bias, and I should have been able to feel that, but no, I kept trying to fill this void, which wasn’t even so much a void, but some sort of vacuum that kept sucking out anything I might say into this area of diagnosis. As soon as it seems improbable, or goes against some programming or brainwashing, there comes the security they have that it’s not going on. The one thing being on disability did for me all these years was give me the space to be creative, to allow the arts to be healing, what their nature is. When I could have lost it, like the people you see “ranting and raving” on a street corner (the ones the New York mayor was trying to convince should all be put into an asylum https://www.ascendantny.com/involuntary-treatment-laws-in-new-york/ describing just that, the ones you’ve all seen at street corners), instead of trying to vent that way, I could go to a computer, with midi keyboard, and compose music, my mind, ears, heart, fingers, eyes, spirit, etc. had something to do, just to do, because I was alive, not because I had to fit into the system that was oppressing me…. that’s a great win for me, I could for my soul discover what art truly is as healing, I didn’t have to meet anyone’s idea of whether it fulfilled their desire to be entertained, as if it’s a drug an intoxication, but in the meantime, go to any museum, any concert hall, read any book, look at any poetry, the stuff that has survived time, the stuff that was created during the same struggles we have now that surround us every day, the stuff that shows what’s left over what remains, the beauty that was there the whole time, and you’ll find yourself in community with people that the mental health system has all used as example of having some mental health disease they could in this time fix up. Whole communities of psychiatrists with high paychecks, abilities to prescribe medications, offices ready, could lock those up who weren’t being treatment compliant, recite whole lengths of academic and philosophical analyses of what’s going on, spice this up with what kind of magic yet to be found chemical imbalance is going on, fix this with what’s proven after an interim of suppressing symptoms to make everything worse, and voila, just give us a time machine and we can fix up Beethoven for bipolar, Dickens for depression, and then people like Sylvia Plath, Camille Claudel, Josef Hassid, Nijinsky, Virginia Woolf, and all the others whose lives were ruined by the mental health system, they would be fixed up now too, although current treatment might have less success as well as being involved with causing an epidemic. But we have this hunt going on for what we haven’t found, we’re making headway, the brain is so illusive, we haven’t found it yet, in the meantime things have gotten much worse statistically, we’re actually causing chemical imbalance scientifically rather than healing it, but……..

    Is this really a disease? When you listen to a Mozart symphony, when you watch a Shakespeare play, when you look at a painting of Frida Kahlo, stand in the Sistine Chapel do you think: “that person had a disease, let’s see what was wrong with them” or do you think something else was going on? Any of those people could end up in a present psychiatrist’s office and voila……

    HOW predatory in reality is this to go on about some disease, for more than half a century have “cures” that with the statistics going on start at 15% don’t get better to then 97% don’t, those diagnosing in the beginning having started the whole wave of “diagnosis” associated with what ends up being a spike of mental health diseases in general (more names, more diseases, less healing), and to say anything about this one still has to go on about a disease, because that was the beginning? How predatory is this, actually? How predatory is this to keep condoning what started the whole scourge?

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    • Nijinsky,

      Whatever “anxiety/depression” is, it’s hardly a deficiency of alcohol or of other psychotropic, unless in the hungover, right?

      What drove Diana Nyad to swim from Coins to Florida?

      I think it is indeed helpful, useful to look on “depression,” which is really “anxiety /depression ,” a divine gift we all inherit as our reward for taking on human form (once more).

      https://youtu.be/M5ZRsIVBmcs?si=4-736-G1t_lqqJc1

      Whether or not we see any human being who is not yet a fully awakened “Zen master” or buddha or christ as being neurotic – motivated primarily by fear, negativity, existential angst, ennui de la vie, or whatever, we wish to call it, since long before Socrates and his Cave analogy, Jesus and his cross, and Frodo and his ring, it seems we humans have all had to face dark nights of the soul to reach Clear Blue Water of Serenity.

      As long as we find ourselves either in or back in The Cave, we can take courage from such men as those and as Viktor Frankl, Robert Pirsig and Gordon Wilson, not to mention countless even braver women, and try to choose to believe that our every moment of suffering is necessary…at least until it no longer is, until we realize we no longer need it, need internal resistance, until we can find enough joy in helping one another free all of us from our caves, concentration camps, kitchens, and, as the prophet Leonard Cohen reminds us, escaping “from the homicidal bitchin’ that goes on in ev’ry kitchen, to determine who will serve and who will eat, and establish “Democracy,” – Enlightenment, Zen, The Kingdom of the Heavens,” here in the US and all over our little planet, one by one?

      https://youtu.be/DU-RuR-qO4Y?si=rfabq613tdj233TG

      “Since I gave up hope, I feel a LOT better!”

      “Depression” is, I believe, that hopelessness or despair which we can none of us avoid but must and do all go through, learn from, and transcend.

      Wishing you joy,

      Tom.

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      • That’s awfully nice of you to share a video of Von Franz after I mentioned how frustrating it was with my parents glorifying her, and yet not having the simple ability to relate to something not that mental, and she does address this notion of “depression” as a disease. That it isn’t. But beyond that, her whole analyses of how a community is built, or how Switzerland survives as a country…. It’s never the community as she describes it that gives a space for evolution, never has been, never will be, doesn’t work that way. It’s the one organism that deviates from such a matrix, that mutates, that does its own thing, that listens to its own voice, and it finds a whole other harmony beyond the strategical organization of “the community.” You can look at the community, say how it works, present all the cogs in the wheel, all the pieces coming together to make this machinery, and yet, it’s exactly the one piece that doesn’t “fit,” that moves away and does its own thing, it’s THAT piece that finds the link to adaptation to an environment that’s always changing, and is never going to warp creativity to what “the community” feel safe with. And it’s that piece that’s part of, and always has been, of a completely different harmony, calling that a community could be too limiting, given how that word is used.

        Yeah, Von Franz, God bless her, is great for people that want to create mental constructs, enough bars to build a cage, that whatever they are saying stays put there……is made out to be perspective, insight, understanding, and perhaps for some people it works for them….. God Bless it…..

        But that’s what Plato (and it was his allegory, Socrates was an actor in it), was saying about the cave. It’s the voices telling people what the shapes on the wall are, it’s THOSE voices trying to make people feel safe that they “know” something……

        It’s quite silly of Von Franz to talk about how Switzerland doesn’t fight war, when would one really look at the banking system, what Switzerland has to do with it, how all sides are funded, imprisoned in debt, and thus manipulated to keep the circle going by sociopaths controlling the banks, the corporations etc. Those people wouldn’t even feel what Franz talks about as “holy” suffering. To begin with they are product of a world that thinks it needs to train a certain crowd of people to fight their wars, to put people in jail, to punish via the judicial system: those people are TRAINED to turn off human empathy…..

        What kind of a magic is depression supposed to be, by the way? I talked to an uber driver, who out of nowhere simply stated: “In Africa we don’t have depression, no one is sad, if you’re sad you do something…..” I’ve heard this so often, people wonder what you’re supposed to get out of sitting in a room talking about unpleasant things, and this will solve your “depression.” In the meantime, the wind hasn’t stopped blowing, because there’s a variation of air pressure, this wafts clouds through the avenues in the air, and there’s rain, and the plants grow. All while someone is locked up inside this little room being “deep” and having mental “perspective and insight,” building mansions and castles in “air” they have such mental insights…………

        It might actually being someone that becomes “un-rooted” as Von Franz refers too, that actually instead sees the beauty of the flowers, still there, still part of home. And become part of nature, rather than living to get rewards from the system. And an “un-rooted” or “rootless” community also would understand trauma enough that it wouldn’t be like in a “rooted” community where when someone is too different, THEY end up being the ones of whom it is decided that person is crazy. It’s “the community” that does that, and any trauma is too much it to deal with, would it expose these voices keeping them locked up and safe…….. When you instead show interest in the trauma, you see what it really is, rather than some necessary form of population control, and there wouldn’t be this group of people trained to traumatize others, call it justice, or a means to an end, and perhaps THEN the wars, and the deceptions that they are necessary at all for societal harmony, THEN…. You might have a “community.” And miracles would happens, and be natural and “normal.”

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          • Absolutely no need to apologize. I had never even looked into Von Franz at all, only heard conversations by my parents, my father particularly, and the way he would go on about how her use of symbolism was so amazing (I remember some remark about Unicorns). How she uses this and then that, and brings this in, all explaining collective consciousness or the subconscious. As if this is where perspective in the inner mind comes from. Unicorns are part of stories, mythology, if not more than that, but to give them some concrete meaning….. Von Franz here goes on about all sorts of stuff here, that rather makes me laugh, as response. She goes on about someone’s sexual fantasies, as if it’s any of her business to judge, and then decides whether he should still be living with his mother, making me wonder what kind of formula anyone would have to fit their life into before she dissects it….. I guess people get something out of being handed out high brow analyses…..

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7kUpMOzEoA&t=234s Goes on about the four types of women Jung used, and what’s wrong with the mother Mary image. Well, there you go, someone who has had a rather pious mother using an image of being so good to make another feel as if they have to also become such an ikon or there’s something wrong with them, bring them to Von Franz, have her bring up mother Mary and the other three female potentials, and it’s all solved (I’m being sarcastic). There we have Hollywood and image games, what this is supposed to have to do with the actual Mother Mary is beyond me, already. She goes on to such a degree with analyses, and meanings to things, I simply don’t know what she’s going on about after a while. Who knows what she’s going on about. She goes on and on about Jesus, and then acts as if she knows what his struggle was. Mentions being torn, as if that was his purpose, if that’s what she’s saying at all. There is a book called A Course in miracles: interesting history: A woman started hearing a voice, a woman that was a militant atheist, highly competitive medical psychologist, but was having difficulty with a colleague, and then he I think had said: “there’s got to be a better way,” and she (this psychologist) started hearing what she calls a voice, for lack of knowing how to describe it. And the voice started dictating this book, because otherwise she was annoyed by it. They’d lock each other up in a basement close the curtains and go over what had been dictated. All that so no one would see she had signs of going crazy. This psychologist. The book then identified its voice as being Jesus, and it was published by someone who had been told she would do such. “Jesus” himself says this there: “I elected, for your sake and mine, to demonstrate that the most outrageous assault, as judged by the ego, does not matter. 2 As the world judges these things, but not as God knows them, I was betrayed, abandoned, beaten, torn, and finally killed. 3 It was clear that this was only because of the projection of others onto me, since I had not harmed anyone and had healed many.” To read A Course in Miracles, it basically says you crucify yourself, rather than other are doing that. It’s quite hard logic, I worked on that book for years and years, it’s not like I completely agree with Jesus at all, and there’s the aspect that he himself was traumatized, and so such an escape was an escape rather than what it’s made out to be, even the people calling themselves Christians are denying they don’t really except him, because look he’s this symbol, a badge you can use. He did this, he was resurrected, he’s the authority. As if he’s the only angel among us that ever appeared after death without all the drama. You can get out of a situation, and forgive that way also, that might be in ways more challenging, and in ways easier, both at the same time, but that’s not what happened. I have memories from that time, seeing him on the donkey he entered Jerusalem on, and I thought: “oh GOD! He’s not going to survive this.” He could have escaped the territory, in the end Lazarus had to, they were going to kill him as well, even says that in “the bible.” But then there’s the trauma regarding his family also, how he was supposed to be this great prophet, and other parts of him had been suppressed. In the Urantia Papers, it says that he wasn’t allowed to draw in school anymore, as a child already, it had been reported and he was accused of idolatry, somehowe everything one drew had to be “God,” so they could determine what it was, as if it wasn’t everything or anything. His father had been accused of being a bad father, and then forbid his son to draw or even make little clay sculptures. They were in a Greek village and Jesus loved their playhouse, but then forget himself and told his father he wanted such in their village, and his father had a fit saying he didn’t want to hear anything ever again about this Greek stuff. Nice father huh? Jesus also played harp, and sang, probably quite limited in what words he could use, but he did, and people would come around just to hear him sing. After his father had died, he was the eldest, had a little sister name Ruth who had friends that would play while in the courtyard, one would pull Jesus off the workbench and DEMAND a story. There it goes right? None of that is good enough, he has to be a great “prophet.” Can’t just live life and see God in art….. I’m quite on a tangent here, but it’s quite amazing that people go on about mental health and depression, and how it can lead to suicide, but here someone CHOSE their own end, and it’s heralded, whole Institutions that are tax exempt have come from it……And I read that there are more church buildings than hospitals worldwide….. And then there’s the other side, what if Jesus actually was uprooted, that it wasn’t just about this metaphysical display, that it actually hurt so much how he was treated, even his followers weren’t allowed anything but to buy stuff, weren’t allowed in the temple anymore, weren’t allowed get-togethers, he was followed wherever he went, they constantly were trying to trap him…….Many people heralding how “Christian” they are would do the same to Jesus now again. In fact a healer that helped me, as a child he was put in an asylum and given shock therapy because a Catholic Priest had said that when miracles happened around him, he had been given a special gift by the devil, and the devil wouldn’t like the shock therapy and loosen his grip on the man. His story is here: https://youtu.be/g9edB02jWP0?si=q8EJlFI8J8eA-7sd&t=726

            And I’m getting distracted. I have a very long relationship with Jesus, and that spans at least 5000 years, and he by all means was not throughout history always the angel he’s made out to be, but that’s how one learns. You make mistakes. You’re programmed to act a certain way, something you thought wasn’t important you throw away or worse, and voila, it’s not there anymore. But as soon as you learn to value it, see what you “lost” there it is. There you have Plato’s cave allegory, what’s from forever, couldn’t be lost. I’m supposed to be “schizo-effective” but thus, sometime between July 27 (when we had my father’s funeral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmpJ2EDfh7s ) and September 27, while I was in “an episode,” along with quite a few other things, I stepped right into the other dimension, and there actually was Jesus, and we had a little interaction, which I’m now, from this “distraction” getting back into, there’s stuff we were both working on regarding what I can’t get into here, and he could move on, as well. What the difference is, would be, isn’t, doesn’t metter between “schizophrenia” where there’s no difference between inner and outer awareness, when in reality inner is more real than outer, to begin with…….and then entering a dimension that touches upon forever…….

            The Urantia papers clears quite a lot up. As does a Course in Miracles. No, Jesus never said he came to bring a sword. He also never walked on water, that was Peter dreaming he saw this, and while yet dreaming stepped out of a boat into the water and had to be rescued. There were miracles abundant, though. He was conduit for a boy with emotional problems to be healed, the boy would be fine, and then go to the caves and howl for awhile, then come to himself again. Jesus was conduit to heal him, but at the same time there was a dog that barked, and consequently some sheep jumped over a cliff, and the sheep herders instead acknowledging the miracle blamed this on Jesus, and didn’t want him around, as if he had anything to do with what could have happened if he was there or not.

            ANYHOW!

            She’s perfectly correct, in the other video that wars uproot people, and this is tragic, traumatizing, turns their life upside down, robs them of any feeling of safety, which only more makes me wonder why she goes on about “community” as being the source of comfort, when someone who would go to a psychologist, say for help with what’s called a mental health problem, they would have probably experienced EXACTLY how the “community” might be the problem. Probably in the community, and probably at home, BOTH. They probably were uprooted by the community already, and the family, didn’t feel at home, had no place to go. And then…. It’s exactly to me, how a community doesn’t have room for such people that typifies the environment ignoring trauma, and then also using it as if this is discipline, it’s THAT environment that breeds the sociopaths that end up stirring up wars, waging them, profiting off of them. It’s the community that puts out such “discipline” is necessary, and finds a need to train people to suppress their compassion and empathy for others, in order to implement such “Discipline.” I’ve read Against Therapy
            by Mousaieffe and it explains so much regarding what Von Franz is going on about. What does it say about someone who when confronted by women who had been sexually abused, or suppressed by the patriarchical society, what does it say that in order to hide this trauma and stay politically correct, he starts making up something as obscene and ridiculous as “penis envy” for women. I have to laugh and it’s not even funny. Jung then thought women should be housewives, he was quite racist regarding brown skinned people……..

            I’m quite complaining about stuff. It’s all a mystery, an adventure.

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  32. Yes, I should have said – thanks Mr Whitaker for your persistence in reporting the bad reporting and for being a lone voice. Noam Chomsky was going on about our moral conscience or something like that recently on Youtube but really it seems only 1% of our species actually have one

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  33. Yep…. Here we go again…. The mainstream media corps are also owned by big pharma owners! So of course the truth will never be covered. It’s like the US penal system run by for-profit businesses…. No one will benefit and untold numbers will continue to be harmed. Sad but true

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  34. As a neuroscientist with a focus on neurochemistry and behavior, I have been skeptical about the utility of psychiatric medications. It has always been my contention that “mental illness” is an expression in certain individuals of a societal malady. Medicating individuals in the face of a dysfunctional society is unethical. It is the societal malady that needs to be addressed, but that is exactly what society refuses to do.

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  35. Absolutely, and what research study or academic discipline is going to illuminate the psychological underpinnings of the social malady? Hang on – why do I say the social maladies of our times have psychological underpinnings? Because the whole of civilization IS our thought and feeling materializing itself through our socially conditioned activity which include all the things we produce and accumulate through time and thereby impose on the brain of each subsequent generation. So mind creates all the forms and structures within civilization, and these forms and structures condition the brains of each subsequent generation and populate the socially conditioned mind with everything it has. And what research paper or academic discipline is or can unveil this total psychosocial and historical process? None at all, because it cannot be approached through a fragmentary discipline because it IS the whole.

    So what role does the brain have, in actuality, in this total psychosocial process? The brain is evidently conditioned by the forms and processes within civilization, is conditioned by the ideologies and attitudes and values and processes of argument and deduction and so forth – these things are learned from the social millue by a natural, free young human being and it’s perfect natural brain, and this conditioning manifestly shapes the thinking and the life activity of the organism through the brain. This is clear. So with an ever mushrooming social historical totality that has spread and encompassed the globe, with its mushrooming sophistication and complexity, with it’s multiplication of human problems and the radical exponential increase in media output and output of information, ideologies and news of world events and so forth, and with the radical increasing technologization and corporatization of every aspect of not just our material but also our cultural and psychological life (think entertainment, therapy, the wellbeing industry and etc etc etc which takes over our inner lives) – with all this unimaginable explosion of material, linguistic, technological and cultural material and explosion of social, economic and corporate processes, we are imposing more and more not just on the human brain through conditioning and ever more insane, contradictory and disturbing social experience, but also we are asking the whole biological organism – infinitely complex and fine in it’s workings – to adjust to this radical explosive change in the social and psychological environment within the blink of an evolutionary eye. So inevitably there are signs of a growing neurological, physiological, spiritual and emotional inability to assimilate and adjust to all the radical changes in social and cultural life and this is evident not just in the explosion of what they call ‘mental illness’ and suicide and mass shootings and drug overdoses and corrupt politicians and craven economic, social, ideological, political and spiritual vampires of every kind, but also an explosion of hate, anger, violence and confusion, signs of a desperate organic substrata writhing and dying, crushed under the weight of social history which constitutes a total global structure dominated by said vampires who use it to control and contain and pillage us just as it has pillaged and destroyed the rest of humanity and Mother Nature (these two being also one total process or life-system), and we are all caught in that like a car which no-body can steer.

    Now, what research paper or academic department is exposing all this to itself? None. Only human beings like you and me. So I agree with absolutely every word you say in your comment, but I want to challenge you with the rest of the picture which I think is self-evident to those who will approach it dispassionately and impersonally, considering only the facts and rejecting all opinion, theory and conclusion. So we have a much vaster problem then psychiatry or psychiatric medicines here, and the brain is at most a victim, not a cause of our problems. Our problems are caused by our social historical accumulations imposed on the brain, body and the rest of Mother Nature destroying everything it touches, and deranging the delicate and infinitely complex neurological, physiological, emotional, sensuous, instinctual and spiritual workings of a total human being the depth and complexity of which has never and will never be measurable by thought or science and it’s concepts. Meditation, or perception, alone can begin to grasp this infinite complexity including through scientific experiment, and it is that meditation or perception that furnishes you with the insight you innumerate in your comment above and those I innumerate here. I hope we’re on the same page and it’s a page beyond even the appendix, beyond even the last page.

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  37. Nijinsky, that was a wonderfully heartening response and a wonderful, wonderful funeral, too, thank you!

    Some of the most joyful moments of my own life, too, occurred on hearing of my own mother’s transition from some 6,000 miles away.

    I believe the central message of “A Course in Miracles” (which has inspired Eckhart Tolle and Marianne Williamson, among others, in their writing) holds the power to banish all our “depressions,” and all our secrets and all our lies and all our wars, don’t you?

    https://acim.org/acim/text/introduction/en/s/51

    https://www.miraclecenter.org/a-course-in-miracles/T-2.V.A.php

    Heartfelt and soulfelt thanks, Nijinsky.

    Peace.

    Tom.

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