Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs: 0

fundamental claims of modern American psychiatry 1 are not based on well-tested research but on science that is itself a bit mad: misconceived, flawed, erroneous, misinterpreted, and often misreported.

and half of the population will have a mental illness during their lifetime.

With at least one in four American women and one in seven American men today receiving psychoactive drugs by prescription,

Social scientists have to decide, every time they do research, what to call the things they study. If they choose the terms decided on by the interested and powerful parties already involved in the situations they are studying, they accept all the presuppositions built into that language.

illness, nearly one hundred million people, 25 to 30 percent of the US population, have a mental illness during any one year (Frank & Glied, 2006, pp. 10–11),

In addition, in 2007 Bristol-Myers paid $515 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the federal government over accusations of fraud in which the drug company employed a kickback scheme to defraud Medicare and Medicaid. Several years later California regulators filed suit, accusing Bristol-Myers of bribing doctors and pharmacists to use its products,

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it” (Greenberg, 2011).

The most prominent American child psychiatrist, Joseph Biederman of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, considered the undisputed “inventor” of childhood bipolar disorder—which arguably triggered both the bipolar epidemic in children and their treatment with antipsychotics—had received over a million dollars in payments from

much of psychiatric research actually undermines the biomedical hypothesis of brain disease as an explanation of madness.