Mad in America by Robert Whitaker
The treatment of the mentally ill in America is pretty awful. The main treatment in the last 70 years is to just partiallly destroy the patient's brain, nowadays by using drugs, in the past through lobotomies and many other methods. What has worked far better was simply being nice to the mentally ill. The Soteria Project in the 70's, the Quakers more than a hundred years ago, and something very recent in the lapland area of Finland are examples which went in such a direction and had far better results. Actually also something similar often occurs in the third world where the mentally ill are far less likely to be ruined by the drugs. All have had far better results than what has been done in America and Western Europe to a lesser extent.

Most recently the pharmaceutical industry has become very powerful and sophisticated. A number of dishonest studies have been pushed through by doctors who as a result literally own castles with moats, etc. Their drugs, which are only positive to the extent that they chemically lobotomize potentially dangerous psychotics (and that's an extremely small percentage of the mentally ill), are considered wonder drugs, and are now being given even to children.

It's the idiocracy. Like giving gatorade to plants. I almost am amazed that all these highly "educated" people could take part in such things. Then I remember my own experiences in academia.

Meh. I don't know what else to bother saying.

It's a really well done book. It's a world shattering sort of book. It could change people's views of the entire world, far beyond psychiatry, through seeing how FUBAR this particular area is. Because if all these PhDs and the prevailing status quo can actually be this wildly wrong in this day in age in psychiatry, what else might we be wrong about?

Well, a lot actually.

I'd recommend it to people, except that I don't actually know anyone whom I think has enough of a brain to actually read it.

And thus, what does it matter?