Summary of Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic

By IRB Media

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#1 As a society, we have come to believe that psychiatry has made great progress in treating mental illness over the past fifty years. We have many effective and safe treatments for psychiatric disorders.

#2 While the American Psychiatric Association claims that they have come a long way in understanding psychiatric disorders, the truth is that the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States has skyrocketed since the arrival of Prozac and the other second-generation psychiatric drugs.

#3 In 1955, there were 566,000 people in state and county mental hospitals. However, only 355,000 had a psychiatric diagnosis, as the rest suffered from alcoholism, syphilis-related dementia, Alzheimer’s, or mental retardation.

#4 The comparison between the rates of mental illness in 1955 and 1987 is an imperfect one, but it’s the best one we can make to track the increase in disability rates between those years. In 1955, there were only 50,937 people in state and county mental hospitals with a diagnosis for one of the affective disorders. But by 1987, people struggling with depression and bipolar illness began showing up on the SSI and SSDI rolls in ever-increasing numbers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822545618

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Insights on Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

As a society, we have come to believe that psychiatry has made great progress in treating mental illness over the past fifty years. We have many effective and safe treatments for psychiatric disorders.

#2

While the American Psychiatric Association claims that they have come a long way in understanding psychiatric disorders, the truth is that the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States has skyrocketed since the arrival of Prozac and the other second-generation psychiatric drugs.

#3

In 1955, there were 566,000 people in state and county mental hospitals. However, only 355,000 had a psychiatric diagnosis, as the rest suffered from alcoholism, syphilis-related dementia, Alzheimer’s, or mental retardation.

#4

The comparison between the rates of mental illness in 1955 and 1987 is an imperfect one, but it’s the best one we can make to track the increase in disability rates between those years. In 1955, there were only 50,937 people in state and county mental hospitals with a diagnosis for one of the affective disorders. But by 1987, people struggling with depression and bipolar illness began showing up on the SSI and SSDI rolls in ever-increasing numbers.

#5

The number of children under eighteen who receive an SSI payment because they are disabled by a serious mental illness has increased dramatically in the last twenty years.

#6

The history of psychiatry and the rise in psychiatric medications must explain why there is a dramatic increase in the number of disabled mentally ill, why affective disorders are so much more common now than they were fifty years ago, and why so many children are being laid low by serious mental illness today.

#7

If the conventional history is true, and psychiatry has made great progress in identifying the biological causes of mental disorders and developing effective treatments for them, then we can conclude that psychiatry’s reshaping of our society has been for the good.

#8

The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, a group that meets at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, has grown in lockstep with the epidemic of mental illness in the country.

#9

The group talked about the stigmas that the mentally ill face in society, as well as the loss of empathy from family and friends after a time.

#10

The group sessions at the DBSA were finished, and people were starting to gather in the cafeteria to socialize. It was clear that the evening had lifted the spirits of many. Yet, as far as I could tell, only the college professor was currently employed.

#11

In medicine, the personal stories of patients diagnosed with a disease are known as case studies, and it is understood that these anecdotal accounts cannot prove whether a treatment works. Only scientific studies that look at outcomes in the aggregate can do that.

#12

I first met Cathy Levin in 2004, not too long after I had published my first book on psychiatry, Mad in America. I immediately came to admire her fierce spirit. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but her diagnosis had later been changed to schizoaffective. She had been saved by an atypical antipsychotic, Risperdal.

#13

After she was released from the hospital in early 1994, a psychiatrist told her to try Risperdal, a new antipsychotic that had just been approved by the FDA. She responded very well to the drug, and went back to school