Mad in America

Introduction

In the Preface to Mad in America, the author points to a startling fact, that over the past twenty-five years, outcomes for people suffering with schizophrenia in the U.S. have worsened. More than 2 million Americans suffer with schizophrenia. Many end up homeless, in prisons, or in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Schizophrenia is estimated to cost the U.S. more than $45 billion annually. These facts led Whitaker to ask, "If the medications work so well, then why do 'schizophrenics' fare so poorly in the United States?" Ironically, schizophrenia outcomes in the U.S. and other developed countries are much worse than in the poor countries of the world. If you suffer a psychotic break in a poor country like India or Nigeria, in a couple of years you have a good chance of improvement (Rhead, 57).

Discussion and Analysis

World Health Organization (WHO) researchers found that at two-year and five-year follow-ups, "patients in three poor countries-India, Nigeria, and Colombia- were doing dramatically better than patients in the United States and four other developed countries." (p.227) At five years, 64% of the patients in the poor countries were asymptomatic and functioning well. Another 12% were neither fully recovered nor chronically ill.

What Mad in America covered in great detail and with very convincing evidence is the fact that the corruption by pharmaceutical money of science, and even mental health support organizations, is virtually complete at this point. The older neuroleptics are becoming less profitable as their monopoly-granting patents expire. In their place pharmaceutical companies are beginning to turn their powerful PR apparatus toward manipulating psuedo-science and public opinion to promote the new “atypical” antipsychotic agents. Unlike the older neuroleptics, which primary disrupted just one neurotransmitter (dopamine), this new generation of drugs of will disrupt as many as five, which may lead ...