Rating: 
Summary: Disturbing, and appropriately so
Review: It's rare that a topic so thoroughly researched is written in such a way that it is accessible to the lay reader. This book fills that gap almost effortlessly. As I read chapter after chapter of Mad in America, I found myself yelling at the pages, "Leave them alone! Just stop! You're making it worse!"
The treatment of the mentally ill in this country is a truly heinous and systemic problem. The public has been entirely led astray-perhaps beyond repair-with the notion that madness is cured through a pill. To even suggest that there is no test available to measure a chemical imbalance of neurotrasmitters sounds like conspiracy theory to most.
It's amazing to me that the research Whitaker provides by Loren Mosher and Bertram Karon goes largely unexamined in our society. But, then again, they may be more motivated by conscience than money, which makes for rather un-sexy headlines. We stand to learn a lot from the Quakers of York, who viewed the mad among them as troubled brethren in need of love and support, not a nuisance to society getting sacrificed on an altar of convenience.
Rating:
Summary: Mad in America: A Daring Critique of Psychiatry
Review: Journalist Robert Whitaker does his profession proud in this well-researched, insightful, courageous, and critical book. He dares to ask the question that few in the profession of psychiatry dare to ask: why are the cure rates for schizophrenia so low in America, the most well-developed country in the world? In the first part of the book, Whitaker provides the reader with a sound history of the brutal and horrifiying practices of American psychiatry (with the exception of the brief "moral treatment" movement in the 19th century). Thus he is able to show that today's psychiatry has not progressed all that much towards healing the suffering of the mentally ill. In fact, psychiatry may be exacerbating suffering in the name of "good science." As Whitaker points out, we don't have to look far in the past for historical precedents for such misguided treatment--the Eugenics movement of the early part of the 20th century, which he documents in detail, is a prime example. As Whitaker shows, mental patients today may not be seen "lower animals" as they were in the 18th century, but they are now treated as "diseases," not as suffering human beings who may have insight into the causes of their suffering. In the second half of the book, Whitaker does an especially powerful job of pointing out the damaging effects of neuroleptics--euphemized as "antipsychotics"--which often cause "symptoms" of "worsening mental illness." He shows that once an individual is diagnosed with a mental illness such as schizophrenia, he is likely to remain a drugged, disempowered mental patient for the rest of his life. I cannot recommend this book enough to both laypeople and mental health professionals who are concerned with the drugging of America, and want to understand how such a sorry state of affairs has come about.
Rating:
Summary: shocking expose of psychiatry
Review: Robert Whitaker has written a readable, well-documented, and disturbing book about the arrogant and sometimes monstrous behavior of American psychiatrists towards those they label as schizophrenic. He reveals that psychiatrists, desperate to show the biological basis of mental illness and thus establish their profession as a truly medical one, have since 1750 to the present distorted and covered up research, ignored risks, and abused helpless patients. Whitaker spends the first half of the book relating the earlier history of dehumanizing psychiatric treatments in gruesome detail. He starts with the 18th and 19th centuries, when patients were nearly drowned, spun in chairs to the point of collapse, or had their teeth or intestines removed. He continues through the first half of the 20th century, when the American eugenics movement motivated the sterilization of tens of thousands and inspired Hitler, neurologist Walter Freeman drove around the country with ice picks giving lobotomies through eye sockets, and shock therapies caused convulsions so severe that teeth, jaws, and even spines were often fractured. While the history of psychiatry, at least until 1950, is known to some, telling it lays the groundwork for Whitaker's thesis: that nothing has changed except the technology. The science it still bad, the treatment still abusive, the lying to the public and patients still egregious. Based in part on his own research, Whitaker documents the dark facts behind the past 50 years of treating patients with what are supposed to be antipsychotic medications- known in the profession as neuroleptics-from Thorazine to Clozaril and beyond. He makes the case that these drugs are often no more than chemical lobotomies. He debunks the myth that neuroleptics normalize brain chemistry, because no chemical imbalance is known to cause schizophrenia; instead they damage brain chemistry. While he acknowledges that some patients find them relieving, they cause many to feel like zombies or worse-these drugs were used by the Soviet Union to torture dissidents. They can exacerbate symptoms, make relapses more likely and more severe, and can trigger violence. They can cause a chronic psychiatric condition when recovery is otherwise possible, disabling and sometimes permanent neurological side effects, and death. In order to test pet theories, psychiatrists have experimented on unsuspecting and deliberately misled patients by making their psychoses much worse. Drug companies have conspired with doctors to cover up risks and incompetent research. The World Health Organization has shown that you stand a far better chance of recovering from schizophrenia in a developing country like Nigeria or India, where neuroleptics are rarely given, than in America or Europe. This book is a painful reminder that psychiatrists don't have a special handle on psychological problems, and their hubris can come at great cost to others.
Rating: 
Summary: A disturbing book from a second-class "reporter"
Review: The author clearly demonstrates his own biases and betrays the supposedly objectivity against which a good reporter's work should be judged. Thus, Mr. Whitaker demonstrates himself to be a second-class reporter. The book is based on nothing more than poorly-researched and outdated materials.
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