Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
A comprehensive and highly readable history of psychiatry in the United States.
Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, has a new book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, which looks at the history of mental illness in America, with disturbing results.
Why has the number of adults and children disabled by mental illness skyrocketed over the past fifty years? There are now more than four million people in the United States who receive a government disability check because of a “mental illness,†and the number continues to soar.
Every day, 850 adults and 250 children with symptoms of mental distress are added to the government disability rolls. What is going on? Are they really being helped by psychiatric drugs, or are these drugs really a colossal hoax?