Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.

Abstract

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Robert Whitaker. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010, 404 pp., $26.00 (hardcover). Although we have the same last name, the author of Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America and the present reviewer are not related. If I have bias, it can be attributed to my having read some of his previous works including Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (2002), one of his books and articles that have won national awards. At present, building on his previous research and further rigorous inquiry into virtually every aspect of the accelerating, particularly, American phenomenon of promoting psychiatric diagnoses and drugs, Robert Whitaker has documented the devastating but persistently denied long-term consequences of psychiatric drugs. Anatomy of an Epidemic is so well researched and written and its findings so evidently truthful that any reasonably intelligent reader might assume it would quickly be adopted in all health policy and practice. However, another kind of reality keeps getting in the way. Briefly stated, the other reality comprises moneyed interests synergistically compounded with our universal desire for quick fixes alleged to make us more comfortable in the short run. Thus influenced, even the most intelligent of our species may persistently deny this book's validity. The author, keenly aware of the business aspects of clinical drug testing and the lure of denial, chose to eschew assumptions about psychiatric drugs and to take the reader through his step-by-step investigatory process. In 1994, Robert Whitaker began his intellectual journey as a believer in the conventional wisdom . . . that psychiatric researchers were discovering the biological causes of illnesses (leading) to a new generation of psychiatric drugs that helped 'balance' brain chemistry . . . like 'insulin for diabetes.' (p. xi). There was much history to investigate because the so-called modern era of psychiatry dates back to 1954 with the introduction of antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine and the promise of preventing patients from becoming chronically ill. More than a half century later, the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that 1 in every 16 young adults was seriously mentally ill, and we had outstripped all other nations with our plague of illness in newly minted adults. Whitaker's latest book takes the reader with him on his rigorous scientific discovery process, integrated with patient accounts illustrating particularly how they suffer the consequences of having believed in the pseudoscience of psychiatric drugs. It is a story told by a master science journalist integrating a wealth of carefully researched facts into a major discovery. Instead of producing medical miracles, fulfilling fervent promises to prevent, cure, or at least ameliorate mental diseases, psychiatric drugs, their supposed increasingly strong scientific foundation disproven with each claim investigated, have done the opposite; in actual effect, the drugs have caused real disease, disablement, and death. Thorazine and other neuroleptic drug treatments are now clearly shown to produce chronicity, not prevention or cure or even limitation of disablement. Their theoretical basis, arguing that schizophrenia was caused by excess dopamine supply and transmission in the brain, led to systematically depleting many millions of patients of a neurotransmitter essential for vital neurological and cognitive function and for enjoyment of life. In the 1970s, studies showed that schizophrenic patients not treated with neuroleptic drugs did better than those drug-treated. Nondrugged patients not only had fewer short-term disturbing symptoms; over the long term, they were more able to cope with subsequent life stresses; neither were they brain-damaged and made prone to earlier deaths caused by the drugs. …