This sounds like an important book. The key point is this: [The scientific literature on psychiatric drugs] is remarkably consistent in the story it tells. Alt

This sounds like an important book. The key point is this: [The scientific literature on psychiatric drugs] is remarkably consistent in the story it tells. Although psychiatric medications may be effective over the short term, they increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill over the long term. Most people nowadays think that psychiatry finally established itself on a scientific footing with the biochemical model of mental illness and associated drug treatments. If this guy's right, then the biochemical model and associated drugs are just the latest chapter in a long history of pseudo-scientific barbarism, this time founded on a massive conflict of interest. This part is positively Orwellian: At some later point, however, as the chemical imbalance story repeatedly fell apart, psychiatrists in the research community understood that they were telling a “fib.” I can still remember -- this was the summer of 1998 -- when I questioned a prominent academic psychiatrist about whether the chemical imbalance story was really “true” and he replied by stating that it was a “useful metaphor” that “helped patients understand why they needed to take their medication.”