Robert Whitaker has been one of the most critical voices in psychiatry in recent years, curiously he is not a psychiatrist, psychologist or anything related, he is a journalist and has ventured into the subject of mental health for a fact that seemed scandalous. .
In 1994, Harvard Medical School published a study showing that people with schizophrenia were getting worse when taking medication. In addition, it showed that in so-called “third world” countries, patients who did not have access to medicines had a more favourable development.
“They create a market for their drugs and create patients. -Robert Whitaker-
Robert Whitaker’s journalistic talent led him to question the subject, from then on he published a series of articles at the Boston Globe, then wrote a book that quickly became a classic, is titled Anatomy of an Epidemic and questions, on the basis of very accurate data, what is known to date about psychiatric drugs.
Whitaker’s first research result was the book Mad in America, which contains the findings of Harvard’s study and the World Health Organization (WHO) itself. According to these findings, schizophrenics in more developed countries have advanced less, although they have accessed the latest generation of antipsychotics. In poor countries, however, the opposite happened.
After this publication a great controversy broke out led by psychiatrists, who was accused of being too strict in his comments, so he began to conduct a much more detailed and in-depth investigation, for this he focused exclusively on people who were diagnosed with depression and were taking medications to treat their problem.
One of the data that concluded was that mental illness had increased in number in the United States at an alarming rate, and this growth has coincided with the distribution and use of psychopharmaceuticals, while in 1955 355,000 people entered the country’s psychiatric facilities. The United States, by 1985 the number had reached 1,200,000 patients, how to explain that the higher the number of treatments available, the more patients have appeared?
Based on previous figures, Whitaker has fine-tuned the course of his research and observations, analyzed specific cases and available statistics, so he concluded that prior to the onset of chemical antidepressants, people with this disease had stages of increasing symptoms, but their intensity quickly. declined almost naturally.
Robert Whitaker concludes, based on available data, that antidepressants appear to have a positive effect in the early years of treatment; However, if the use of these medications continues, people get worse and their depression becomes chronic.
In fact, Whitaker offers something even more disturbing: according to the data he has been able to collect, prolonged use of antidepressants generates psychotic episodes, notes that the cases analyzed show that when this happens, psychiatrists simply change the diagnosis of depression to another of bipolarity. This also indicates that something similar is happening with antipsychotics that are prescribed to people with schizophrenia.
Robert Whitaker’s ideas have been the subject of much controversy, even at Harvard University, the journalist did not merely diagnose the situation, but openly accused large pharmaceutical multinationals of being behind this phenomenon, which he designates as responsible for the chronicity of mental problems in building a captive market.
Clearly, many psychiatrists have challenged Whitaker, however, Marcia Angell, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, corroborated the journalist’s findings in 2011. Not only did he find evidence that he might have been right, but also one of the drivers of a Whitaker psychiatrist training project in the United States.
Those aware of the controversy claim that the main evidence that Robert Whitaker has a solid and impeccable job is the fact that until now no pharmaceutical company has sued him for his allegations, if there had been a lie he would surely have been sued. for retracting and thus the prestige of pharmaceutical companies would remain intact. His work is recent, interesting and valuable. It’s worth meeting.