Madness Radio on 12/06/10

Thank you for shining a light on alternative treatments for mental illness. Listeners may also be interested in Robert Whitaker's book "Anatomy of an Epidemic". Whitaker will be speaking in Portland on February 10, 2011.  It would be interesting to know if Daniel Mackler has read this book and get his response.
Thanks.
Anne
 
Here is an excerpt from a press release describing "Anatomy of an Epidemic":

This is the story of a puzzling—and largely hidden—modern plague. As a society, we have come to understand that psychiatry has made great progress in diagnosing and treating mental disorders in recent years. Yet, mental illness is taking an ever-greater toll on our society. For instance, the number of people on government disability due to a mental illness has tripled during the past twenty years, rising from 1.25 million to more than 4 million. The number of disabled mentally ill children has risen 35-fold during this period.
What is going on?
In ANATOMY OF AN EPIDEMIC: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (Crown; April 13, 2010), acclaimed journalist Robert Whitaker investigates that question, much in the manner of a medical anthropologist. In a thrilling and masterfully written narrative, he documents a history of science and medicine that ultimately raises a heretical question: Could our drug-based paradigm of care, in some unforeseen way, be fueling this modern-day plague?
We know that psychiatric medications knock down the target symptoms of a disorder better than placebo in short-term clinical trials, and that many people find them helpful. But what about their long-term effects?

In ANATOMY OF AN EPIDEMIC, Whitaker carefully documents an answer to that question for four major psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder). He does so by digging through 50 years of outcome studies for each illness. Here are just a few of the many surprises in ANATOMY OF AN EPIDEMIC:
 
• In 2007, Martin Harrow, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, College of Medicine, reported on the 15-year outcomes of a large group of schizophrenia patients he has been following since the 1980s. Forty percent of the patients “off medication” had completely recovered, which was eight times greater than the recovery rate for those on antipsychotic drugs.
• In a 1995 study of patients with major depression, investigators from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) reported that over the course of six years, those who were “treated” for the disorder were three times more likely than the unmedicated group to suffer a “cessation” of their principal social role, and seven times more likely to become “incapacitated.”
• Forty years ago, bipolar illness was a rare condition and long-term outcomes for patients so diagnosed were fairly good. Today, there are nearly six million adults in the United States with this diagnosis and their long-term outcomes are poor.
• In the 1990s, the NIMH mounted its first long-term study of a childhood mental disorder (ADHD). At the end of 14 months, the children treated with a stimulant were doing slightly better than those who weren’t medicated. However, at the end of three years, “medication use was a significant marker not of beneficial outcome, but of deterioration.”
 
When readers learn of these long-term studies, they are certain to ask: Why didn’t we know of these results before? As Whitaker documents in ANATOMY OF AN EPIDEMIC, psychiatry has systematically kept these results hidden from the public. In the final part of the book, Whitaker travels to Europe to report on programs that use psychiatric drugs in a selective, cautious manner, and are producing very good results.