What You Should Know About Psychiatry and Psychiatric Drugs
The Myth of Mental Illness, By Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.
Thomas S. Szasz, M.D. demonstrates that what is nowadays accepted as mental illness is whatever psychiatrists say it is-and that psychiatry has-with increasing zeal, defined more and more kinds of behavior as "mental illness." What is termed "mental illness" is in fact behavior disapproved of by the speaker. This is a stigmatizing moral judgment, not a medical diagnosis.
If there is no mental illness, there can be no "treatment" or "cure" for it. When personal problems are seen for what they are-helplessness and fear, envy and rage, and the many other miseries that beset man-and are not masked under the guise of illness, being "mentally ill" ceases to be a refuge from personal accountability, and the individual's responsibility for his own conduct can then be faced.
"It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illness. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social, and ethical problems in living."
A Dose of Sanity, by Sydney Walker III, M.D.
If you are currently being treated for depression, anxiety or panic disorder, attention deficit disorder, a sleeping disorder, or any of a wide array of common behavioral disorders, this book could save your life. If you are being given psychiatric SSRI drugs such as prozac, paxil, zoloft, luvox, effexor, serzone, anafranil, fenfluramine, fen-phen & redux, you must read this book.
In A Dose of Sanity, Sydney Walker III, M.D. takes us inside the big business of contemporary psychiatry and reveals how, by sacrificing sound medical principals in favor of labeling-by-convenience and brain-damaging quick-fixes like prozac, paxil, zoloft, luvox, effexor, serzone, anafranil, fenfluramine, fen-phen, redux, and ritalin, psychiatrists cause untold suffering and destroy the physical and mental health of millions of people.
Reading like a detective novel, A Dose of Sanity, tells the story of dozens of men and women, many of whom suffered needlessly for years, simply for lack of a sound medical diagnosis. You'll meet the concert musician whose lifelong bouts with "psychosis" were actually due to undiagnosed typhus; the widow who was treated for "panic attacks" that turned out to be a thyroid dysfunction; the "hyperactive" boy whose symptoms were caused by exposure to carbon monoxide; and many others saved by the intervention of Dr. Walker and like-minded colleagues.
They Say You're Crazy, By Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D.
A shocking expose of the process by which the mental-health elite judges us all.
How are decisions made about who is normal? Why are people being given psychiatric drugs such as ssri's, prozac, paxil, zoloft, luvox, effexor, serzone, anafranil, fenfluramine, fen-phen and redux? As a former consultant to those who construct the "bible of the mental health professions," the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), Paula Caplan, Ph.D., offers an insider's look at the process by which decisions about abnormality are made. A longtime specialist in teaching and writing about research methods, Caplan assesses the astonishing extent to which scientific methods and evidence are disregarded as the DSM is developed and revised.
The DSM is the guide that most psychiatrists, therapists, and social workers use to determine not only what care will be covered by insurers, but who will be hospitalized against their will and who may be judged incompetent or too disturbed to rear their own children. On a more day-to-day level, the DSM determines how millions of people feel about themselves once they are labeled psychologically "abnormal." And yet this powerful manual, recently released in its fourth edition, is constructed by a tiny clique in the powerful psychiatric establishment, dominated by conservative white males.
In They Say You're Crazy, Paula Caplan demonstrated that much of what are labeled "mental disorders" are actually common life problems or the effects of social injustice-and not signs of illness.
"Paula Caplan has written a lively, marvelous insider's story of how psychiatric diagnoses are invented-how subjective, political, and personal agendas are dressed up in the lab coats of science and offered to the public as 'truth'. Mental health professionals need to read this book to cure themselves of Delusional Scientific Diagnosing Disorder, and the public needs to read it for self protection.", Carol Tavris, Ph.D.
Cruel Compassion, By Thomas Szasz, M.D.
"The truth is that after treatment with neuroleptic drugs, mental patients tend to be sicker and more disabled than before. Many exhibit the toxic effects of the drugs, suffering from a disfiguring neurological disturbance called 'tardive dyskinesia.'"
Millions of Americans, diagnosed as mentally ill, are drugged with ssri's, prozac, paxil, zoloft, luvox, effexor, serzone, anafranil, fenfluramine, fen-phen and redux and are confined by doctors for noncriminal conduct, go legally unpunished for the crimes they commit, and are supported by the state-not because they are sick, but because they are unproductive, unwanted, and "mentally ill". While psychiatrists are obsessed with the false ideas that misbehavior is a medical disorder and that the duty of the state is to protect adults from themselves, we have replaced criminal-punitive sentences with civil-therapeutic "programs." The result is the relentless loss of individual liberty, erosion of personal responsibility, and destruction of the security or persons and property.
Few contemporary thinkers have done more than Dr. Szasz to expose the myths and misconceptions surrounding insanity and the practice of psychiatry.
Thomas Szasz: Primary Values and Major Contentions, By Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.
In the Myth of Mental Illness Thomas S. Szasz, M.D. exposed and critically evaluated the cherished assumptions and misconceptions at the heart of psychiatry. In Thomas Szasz: Primary Values and Major Contentions he successfully isolates his basic claims and the arguments he offers in their behalf.
"By historical and traditional criteria, 'mental illness' is not an illness but a bogus invention that allows behavior, any behavior, to be categorized as 'disease.' Psychiatry is conventionally defined as a medical specialty concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental diseases. I submit that this definition, which is widely accepted, places psychiatry in the company of alchemy and astronomy and commits to the category of pseudoscience. The reason for this is that there is no such thing as 'mental illness'."
"In the history of science, thinking in terms of entities has always tended to precede thinking in terms of processes. Alchemists and astrologers thus spoke of mysterious substances and concealed their methods from public scrutiny. Psychiatrists have similarly persisted in speaking of mysterious maladies and have continued to refrain from disclosing fully and frankly what they do." - Thomas Szasz M.D., Primary Values and Major Contentions
Beyond Bedlam, By Jeanine Grobe
In Beyond Bedlam, more than two dozen contemporary women write about their experiences with psychiatry: how they were mistreated, how they escaped, how they live now, and what can be done to change the system that abused them. Their voices rise above the clamor of psychiatric jargon, "treatment", and "therapy."
"Society blindly regards psychiatry as safe medicine. I found out that the psychiatric institution was not about healing but about the oppression of the human spirit. It taught me to accept being terrorized, tortured, and traumatized because these were 'medicine' and I was 'sick'."
The Tranquilizing of America: Pill Popping and the American Way of Life, By Richard Hughes and Robert Brewin
Dr. Louis Gottschalk states, "We have enough data here that certain of the benzodiazepines [sedatives and tranquilizers] are capable, after a single dose, of significantly disrupting certain kinds of cognitive and/or intellectual functions. Furthermore, this phenomenon outlasts the antianxiety effect of these drugs.
"..People are seeking an easy way out, looking for shortcuts on a path of life that has none; in the end not only will they be disappointed but they will end up by diminishing their humanness, the essence that separates man from animals."
The Myth of the Hyperactive Child & Other Means of Child Control, By Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky
Millions of children have been "diagnosed" as "hyperactive" or having "attention deficit disorder" and millions are now taking amphetamine-type medication, in many cases by order of school officials. Millions of other children have been labeled predelinquent, found to have "deviant" tendencies, or said to exhibit "maladaptive behavior." Can these illnesses be in fact so widespread, or is this a new way the schools have found to deal with healthy children who seem, to parents or teachers, to present some form of difficulty?
This shocking and meticulously documented book covers all aspects of the rapidly spreading ideology of "early intervention," demonstrates how common problems become medical ones, and exposes the shoddy research that underlies those practices. Examining the "scientific" literature as well as searching out the underlying causes of this new and frightening trend, Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky document in telling detail the ways in which old-fashioned punishment and control are being replaced by new forms of medical and social treatment, teaching the younger generation that it must trust the state and its new "science" to define and manage the ways it grows up. The information and ideas they examine are critically important and profoundly disturbing.
The Myth of the A.D.D. Child, by Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D.
The Myth of the A.D.D. Child squarely challenges the mislabeling of millions of children as A.D.D., and questions the overuse of powerful mind-altering drugs in treating children's hyperactivity. Not long ago, children who behaved in certain ways were called "bundles of energy", "daydreamers," or "fireballs." Now they're considered "hyperactive," "distractible," or "impulsive"-victims of the ubiquitous Attention Deficit Disorder. Tragically, such labeling can follow a child through life. Worse, the mind-altering drugs prescribed for A.D.D. are unnecessary-and they are harmful.
And They Call It Help, By Louise Armstong
From the best-selling author of Kiss Daddy Goodnight, comes this investigative journey into a multibillion-dollar industry that imprisons America's children-for profit. Here and now, every year, thousands of kids are transported to a locked world where strange rules prevail and language is without meaning. Those in authority are empowered to administer brain-damaging drugs to children, forcibly restrain them, and lock them in isolation. Yet it is the children who are told over and over that they are the weird ones, the psychiatrically incorrect.
Important note: When trying to withdraw from many psychiatric drugs, patients can develop serious and even life-threatening emotional and physical reactions. It is dangerous not only to start taking psychiatric drugs, but also it can be dangerous to stop taking them. Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs should be done gradually and under medical and clinical supervision.
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