by Frank Brenner
The last three issues of The New York Review of Books has carried an important article (in two parts) by Marcia Angell about the abysmal state of contemporary psychiatry and an exchange between Angell and some of her critics. Thankfully all these articles are available on line and I cannot recommend them highly enough. Angell is a Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. The links to the two parts of her article and the exchange are as follows:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of-psychiatry/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/illusions-psychiatry-exchange/
Angell's article is in the form of a review of a number of new books highly critical of the current state of psychiatry. As someone who addressed some of the same issues over a decade ago in an article originally posted on the World Socialist Web Site (See "Mental Illness and the American Dream" Part One: http://www.permanent-revolution.org/essays/mental_illness_one.htm ,
Part Two: http://www.permanent-revolution.org/essays/mental_illness_two.htm), I was familiar with many of the issues that Angell raises, but even so I was taken aback by some of the revelations she discusses. For instance, in the first installment of her article, she cites convincing evidence, in a book by British psychologist Irving Kirsch, that antidepressants (the most widely prescribed drugs in America) are no more effective than placebos. She also cites journalist Robert Whitaker, who argues that many psychiatric drugs not only have negligible effect in terms of curing patients but actually intensify and prolong mental illness. In the second part of her article, Angell shows how infested the psychiatric profession in America is with drug company money, to a greater extent than any other medical profession, and how diagnoses are often tailored to promote drug sales. Worse still is the way that psychiatry and the drug companies have preyed on children, subjecting hundreds of thousands of them - particularly in poor working class families - to harmful and even potentially lethal drug 'therapies'. These articles add to the vast evidence that psychiatry is far less a science than a means for social control. The inconvenient truth is that mental illnesses are really social diseases, outgrowths of the increasingly pathological state of capitalist society.
The last three issues of The New York Review of Books has carried an important article (in two parts) by Marcia Angell about the abysmal state of contemporary psychiatry and an exchange between Angell and some of her critics. Thankfully all these articles are available on line and I cannot recommend them highly enough. Angell is a Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. The links to the two parts of her article and the exchange are as follows:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of-psychiatry/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/illusions-psychiatry-exchange/
Angell's article is in the form of a review of a number of new books highly critical of the current state of psychiatry. As someone who addressed some of the same issues over a decade ago in an article originally posted on the World Socialist Web Site (See "Mental Illness and the American Dream" Part One: http://www.permanent-revolution.org/essays/mental_illness_one.htm ,
Part Two: http://www.permanent-revolution.org/essays/mental_illness_two.htm), I was familiar with many of the issues that Angell raises, but even so I was taken aback by some of the revelations she discusses. For instance, in the first installment of her article, she cites convincing evidence, in a book by British psychologist Irving Kirsch, that antidepressants (the most widely prescribed drugs in America) are no more effective than placebos. She also cites journalist Robert Whitaker, who argues that many psychiatric drugs not only have negligible effect in terms of curing patients but actually intensify and prolong mental illness. In the second part of her article, Angell shows how infested the psychiatric profession in America is with drug company money, to a greater extent than any other medical profession, and how diagnoses are often tailored to promote drug sales. Worse still is the way that psychiatry and the drug companies have preyed on children, subjecting hundreds of thousands of them - particularly in poor working class families - to harmful and even potentially lethal drug 'therapies'. These articles add to the vast evidence that psychiatry is far less a science than a means for social control. The inconvenient truth is that mental illnesses are really social diseases, outgrowths of the increasingly pathological state of capitalist society.
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