http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2003...ericaJun03.htm
Mad in America
Bad Science and Bad Medicine
TERRY MESSMAN / Street Spirit (San Francisco) Jun03
[Robert Whitaker interview below]

In Mad In America, one lone author bears moral witness to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, and names the names that deserve to live in infamy.

Robert Whitaker's book, Mad In America, is a towering achievement that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best investigative reporting in U.S. history. His book invites comparison with other momentous examples of muckraking journalism, such as Rachel Carson's prophetic environmental exposé, The Silent Spring, or William Lloyd Garrison's liberating reporting on the fight to abolish slavery.

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A STIRRING ACT OF RESISTANCE

The publication of Mad In America is a watershed in the history of human rights. I was not the same after I read it. It is a searing historical exposé that has an impact comparable to reading the stories of Holocaust survivors. It is a song of lamentation for the human beings we have lost. It is an act of compassion that reclaims the humanity of psychiatric survivors.

Finally, it is a stirring act of resistance in , which one lone author bears moral witness to the suffering of hundreds of thousands, and names the names that deserve to live in infamy: the inventors of lobotomy and electroshock and tardive dyskinesia.

For over 30 years, patients rights groups have been speaking out against psychiatric abuses—the torturous treatments, the loss of freedom and dignity, the misuse of seclusion and restraints, the neurological damage caused by "antipsychotic" drugs. But these groups have been condemned and dismissed by the psychiatric. establishment, and their truths censured and denied.

Perhaps it takes a book by an outside journalist who fully believed in the widely parroted story of "progress" being peddled by the giant pharmaceutical corporations that utterly dominate the practice of psychiatry today. Through. his historical and scientific research, Robert Whitaker has shattered that myth of progress and has shown that antipsychotic drugs are nothing more than the latest, most trendy form of "brain-damaging therapeutics."

Mad In America is an astonishing indictment of 250 years of psychiatric mistreatment, dehumanization, torture, and the deliberate infliction of brain damage. One only wishes that it could be prescribed as a form of "forced treatment" and made mandatory reading for every psychiatrist and corporate drug pusher in the land.




FORCED STERILIZATION IN THE U.S.

Whitaker unveils a truly frightening history of prominent psychiatrists joining with the eugenics movement to rid the gene pool of the "insanity gene" by classifying mental health clients as debased and subhuman. Eugenicists sought to cleanse America of the mentally ill by forcibly segregating them in asylums so they couldn't procreate, and then sterilizing tens of thousands of patients to prevent them from breeding.

The U.S. eugenics movement was a key inspiration for Nazi Germany's similar programs to segregate and sterilize mentally disabled people, and German scientists even traveled to California to study our program of forced sterilization.

American eugenics may have reached its apotheosis in 1935 when Alexis Carrel, a' . physician at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, wrote that the mentally ill "should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanistic institutions supplied with proper gases."

The U.S. psychiatrists who embraced the program of compulsory sterilization directly influenced the doctors of the Third Reich, who would soon begin the "mercy killings" of mental patients.

As psychiatry advanced in the 1940s and 1950s, the scientific assault on the brains of patients became, if anything, more methodical and in some cases more terrifying. Insulin- coma, metrazol convulsion therapy, electroshock and lobotomies were used to cripple the frontal lobe and the higher brain functions that separate human beings from the lower primates.

This assault on the brain then came fully into the present with the widespread use of neuroleptic drugs such as Thorazine and Haldol, and the current use of the new "atypical" antipsychotic drugs Zyprexa, Clozaril and Risperdal.

Both the neuroleptics and the atypicals create brain pathology by blocking the flow of neurotransmitters, leaving patients dulled, lethargic and vegetative. The neuroleptics unleashed a devastating epidemic of "persistent Parkinson's" symptoms and the terribly disfiguring neurological dysfunction called tardive dyskinesia. The new atypicals have already been linked with immense weight gain, diabetes, and the dangerous depletion of white blood cells.

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this photo shows -

Psychosurgery Brutality

American psychiatrist Walter Freeman (center)
developed the frontal lobotomy, a barbarous act
which plunged an icepick-like instrument beneath
the eyelid and, using a surgical mallet, drove it
through the eye socket bone and into the brain.
Movement of the instrument severed the fibers of
the frontal brain lobes, causing irreversible brain
damage.