Name: Mad in America
ISBN: 9780738203850

Mad in America

In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker reveals an astounding truth: Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries, and quite possibly worse than asylum patients did in the early nineteenth century. With a muckraker's passion, Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. Tracing over three centuries of "cures" for madness, Whitaker shows how medical therapies have been used to silence patients and dull their minds. He tells of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices of "spinning" the insane, extracting their teeth, ovaries, and intestines, and submerging patients in freezing water. The "cures" in the 1920s and 1930s were no less barbaric as eugenic attitudes toward the mentally ill led to brain-damaging lobotomies and electroshock therapy. Perhaps Whitaker's most damning revelation, however, is his report of how drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed their studies in an effort to prove the effectiveness of their products. Based on exhaustive research culled from old patient medical records, historical accounts, numerous interviews, and hundreds of government documents, Mad in America raises important questions about our obligations to the mad, what it means to be "insane," and what we value most about the human mind.

What Hacker News says

tcj_phxAug 2023

Thanks for the quote. This was part of an essay, Cargo Cult Psychiatry, posted at the Mad in America Foundation's website: https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/06/cargo-cult-psychiatry/

I found Robert Whitaker's books invaluable for helping me understanding the mental health industry's mindset. Mad in America covered how the Quakers got much better results with their Asylums (safe place with 4 meals a day & activities) than modern techniques of lobotomy, ECT'ers and palliative prescriptions. Anatomy of an Epidemic makes the case that palliative psychiatric prescriptions take an episodic condition and make it chronic. Psychiatry Under the Influence chronicles how psychiatry got captured by the prescription drug cartel. Highly recommended.

The good news from the mental health world is that Chris Palmer, M.D. published Brain Energy [0] last year. I haven't read more than excerpts from google books [1]. My understanding is Dr. Palmer was a conventional palliative psychiatrist, then he had a patient whose schizophrenia improved on a ketogenic diet. The patient was able to discontinue antipsychotics: Dr. Palmer's mind was blown. Then he discovered the 70+ years of research establishing that mental health conditions are metabolic problems, and wrote a book.

  Perhaps the most bold and disruptive aspect of 
  Brain Energy is understanding precisely how and 
  why medications that harm metabolism might 
  reduce mental health symptoms.

  The long-term consequences are of great concern 
  and require the urgent attention of the psychiatric 
  community.

-Chris Palmer, MD - https://twitter.com/ChrisPalmerMD/status/1687850270602981376

Dr. Palmer recommends a ketogenic diet. I think most of the benefit of 'keto' stems from avoiding fortified flour: https://twitter.com/JamesKnochel/status/1595562197412851712

A lot of people are harmed by folic acid, and the iron and lack of fiber in fortified white flour is harmful for almost everyone, in that they disrupt the microbiome. Most people get adequate iron, and don't actually need iron filings ("reduced iron"); the fiber in whole wheat fiber feeds bacteria that make short-chain saturated fatty acids [2].

[0] https://brainenergy.com/

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=FoxlEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT233&dq=B...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4756104/

(edited to add [2] and some speculations on the mechanisms of harm of fortified white flour)

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droithommeFeb 2019

> no books by journalists, unless it’s about journalism

Charles Mann's 1491 and 1493 remain the best books on the topic.

Robert Whitaker's Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic likewise.

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HumjobOct 2014

I absolutely agree with this.

For anyone curious about how psychiatry is bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies, read the book "Mad in America" by Robert Whitaker. He looks at studies of the long-term outcomes for schizophrenia patients who are treated with drugs versus those who aren't given drugs. What he finds is that schizophrenics who never take psychiatric drugs have overwhelmingly better long-term outcomes than those that do.

This isn't a mere selection effect either; the studies track cohorts of people who were given the same prognosis (bad, medium, or good) at the beginning of their course of treatment. In each cohort except for the most severe, individuals who were treated with drugs experienced some short-term relief but fared far worse than the non-drug subgroup over the long run.

The psychiatry establishment has a long and ugly history of suppressing alternative treatments which emphasize little/no drug use. There is a massive vested financial interest in the status quo treatment of keeping schizophrenics on drugs for as long as possible. In my opinion it's the most criminal act being perpetrated today on a systemic basis by a supposedly respectable profession. Forget about Wall Street blowing up the economy with collateralized debt obligations or politicians underfunding pension obligations to the tune of billions of dollars; psychiatrists are literally preying on the brains of the mentally ill in direct contradiction to the evidence of which treatments work best, all so they can line their pockets with money.

One concrete example: a study by the World Health Organization found that schizophrenics in the US and other developed countries fared much worse than schizophrenics throughout the developing world. What's the common thread among treatment of schizophrenics in the developed world vs those in the developing world? Drug use.

This issue strikes near to me since I had a run-in with a psychiatrist when I was much younger due to anxiety issues/mild psychotic symptoms which have since been resolved with age and quitting a job which I hated. He kept pressuring me to take drugs, but when I showed him the aforementioned study his response to me was astounding: "Well, I haven't personally seen that in people I've treated." His entire basis of selecting a course of action was anecdotal data!

http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology/index.html - That's another great resource on the sham science underlying psychology/psychiatry. Paul has written a number of them, and they're quite informative.

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tcj_phxOct 2022

She'd made a deal with the devil: they agreed to release her from their September 2015 pursuit of an order for involuntary treatment if she agreed to take haloperidol voluntarily. We picked up the prescription, but she resumed drinking the day she was released. Her alcohol consumption got progressively worse, but I had no authority to intervene. After a week+ I took her liquor bottle away anyways, even though I did not have legal authority to do this. 10 hours later I witnessed full-on alcohol withdrawal psychosis.

When she got captured again, their thinking was "she's obviously back here because she didn't take her haloperidol". They never asked me about her alcohol consumption.

Whitaker's book points out that the Quakers' asylums fed people 4 meals a day and provided activities. iirc around 80% of the patients recovered to the point where they could leave the asylum. Think that was covered in Mad In America.

The psychotic patients who do the best, long term, are those who are never treated with antipsychotics. Those who do second best are those who are tapered off antipsychotics promptly. Those who do the worst are those who are maintained on antipsychotics in perpetuity.

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tcj_phxJun 2022

This blog post is inspired by Richard Feynman's commencement address, Cargo Cult Science: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cargo+cult+science

My efforts to extract my friend from her self-fulfilling misdiagnosis have reached the Supreme Court. The questions of my current petition are about who may perpetrate fraud on the United States Court, but I tried to make it about 'Medical Freedom' [0]. If any of you care about medical freedom, amicus curiae briefs would be very helpful.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31863786

I suppose it's not nice to call the conventional mental health system a cargo cult. But I've been trying to extract my friend from their system for 6.5 years, and have made no progress helping the medical professionals realize their forced prescriptions are the cause behind my friend's 'mental deterioration'.

Do any of you have any insights into why this particular branch of pseudo-medicine is so resistant to reform? It's been 20 years since Whitaker published Mad in America, and the mentally ill are still being pharmacologically abused. "Mental Health" problems are mostly solved [1], but the solutions are not implemented and the abuse continues.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27993405

The Soviet Union sometimes sent their dissidents to their system of Gulags [2] (forced labor camps). Sometimes these dissidents would feign a 'mental disorder' to get themselves transferred from their gulag to a psycho prison. In the later Soviet period doctors at the psycho prison would treat their 'patients' with the anti-psychotic drug haloperidol. Robert Whitaker said the important thing about this historical fact was how American Psychiatrists, and others, called the Soviets' use of haloperidol 'torture' [3].

American doctors use haloperidol not for its agony-inducing effects, but as a tranquilizer for geriatrics, prisoners, and psychotics. Our doctors wouldn't do this if they realized they have much better options to treat the metabolic causes of their patients' symptoms.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17758723

My previous petition told the Justices about the Tragedy of Curtis Bagley [4], who was deteriorated by Arizona's criminal justice system. I don't know if Bagley was tortured with haloperidol, but I think it likely. My friend was injected with haloperidol at her January 2022 'stabilization'.

[4] https://twitter.com/JamesKnochel/status/1509632668169748481

Some of you like your psychiatric pills. The occasional benefit of SSRIs is entirely due to the increase in allopregnanolone [5], not the artificial boosting of serotonin. Many kinds of brain damage cause the brain to boost production of allopregnanolone. It's better to not induce brain damage when all a person really needs is a supplement. The MAOIs are relatively safe anti-depressants, and are reasonably effective for short-term use [6].

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859433

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21439470

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tcj_phxMar 2022

The tragedy of Allopathic Psychiatry is that the doctors think they know what they're doing.

In March 2015, I thought my new friend had substance abuse problems: methadone, heroin, cocaine, alcohol. She invited me into her world. There were a few times when I watched her make herself psychotic when she used too much cocaine, but she came out of that state when the cocaine wore off and got some food. (Ref: my comment history.)

The mental health industry captured her when she ran out of alcohol (see Mad In America link below)

When you're ordered to submit to Allopathic Psychiatry, you can't complain about the forced medications' side effects.

> Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a press conference that he has no intention of rounding people up and locking them away. Instead, he said his plan would offer a way for people to get court-ordered psychiatric treatment, medication and housing, preferably before they are arrested.

My friend was arrested after the start of her court-ordered psychiatric treatment. She'd gotten a job, but couldn't handle the stress, self-medicated with alcohol, relapsed on meth amphetamine. Her doctors use their orders for involuntary treatment to force her to submit to medications that are specifically contraindicated for substance abuse. The probation court made her predicament even worse.

I went to a few of my friend's probation court sessions. I remember a guy who complained about his forced treatment with Abilify (antipsychotic). The judge didn't care. The next time I saw him, he was like "Abilify is the greatest drug ever!". He graduated from probation court, don't know what happened to him. Probably back in the system: Abilify causes compulsive behaviors.

After my friend had been forcibly treated for about 2+ years, all the new clients at her "dual diagnosis" drug treatment program were getting cheek swabbed. She asked for this genetic test for herself, and learned that she can't turn the provitamin folic acid (shelf stable, used to fortify food) into methylated forms of folate (Vitamin B-9, used for DNA synthesis). Her doctors don't care, and continue to force her to take anti-psychotics because that's the only way they know to treat transient psychosis.

The Mad in America Foundation posted my writeup about my efforts on my friend's behalf: Malignant Do-gooderism: The Tragedies of Allopathic Psychiatry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30388925

Someone who read the link above reached out to me over Twitter. This woman had experienced postpartum depression -> postpartum psychosis -> orders for involuntary mental health treatment. She was also in Arizona - I recognized many of the facilities she'd named.

She described what they did to her as 'torture'. She was able to escape with the help of her sister, who negotiated with the psychiatrists on her behalf, until she was able to negotiate for herself.

SCOTUS denied my petition. I intend to seek congressional oversite. I'm going to film a video to explain my earlier videos, which prove my friend was fine before she ran out of alcohol, and proving fraud on the United States Court.

Psychiatry would be exponentially more effective if they'd stop treating their patients allopathically.

Edit: Submitted a WSJ article recently, had to change the title to something less click-baity: 'Report about a case of hydrocephalus mistaken for 'mental illness'" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30354625

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