Robert Whitaker, the Polk Award-winning journalist and author of the recent “Anatomy of an Epidemic”:
The story told to the public by the NIMH and by academic psychiatry is that psychiatric medications have greatly improved the lives of those diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses.
Yet, even as our society has embraced the use of psychiatric medications during the past two decades, the number of people receiving government disability due to mental illness has more than tripled, from 1.25 million people to more than 4 million people.
So you can see, in that data, that something may be wrong with that story of progress.
And then, if you look at how psychiatric medications affect the long-term course of psychiatric disorders, you find — in the scientific literature — consistent evidence that they increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill.
I know this is startling, particularly since we do know that some people do well on the medications long term, but that evidence, in terms of how the medications affect long-term outcomes in the aggregate, shows up time and again in the scientific literature.