Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs
Stuart A. Kirk, Tomi Gomory, David Cohen
Language: English
Pages: 358
ISBN: 1412855926
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
*Winner of an honorable mention from theSociety for Social Work and ResearchforOutstanding Social Work Book Award
Mad Science argues that the fundamental claims of modern American psychiatry are based on misconceived, flawed, and distorted science. The authors address multiple paradoxes in American mental health research, including the remaking of coercion into scientific psychiatric treatment, the adoption of an unscientific diagnostic system that controls the distribution of services, and how drug treatments have failed to improve the mental health outcome.
When it comes to understanding and treating mental illness, distortions of research are not rare, misinterpretation of data is not isolated, and bogus claims of success are not voiced by isolated researchers seeking aggrandizement. This book’s detailed analysis of coercion and community treatment, diagnosis, and psychopharmacology reveals that these characteristics are endemic, institutional, and protected in psychiatry. They are not just bad science, but mad science.
This book provides an engaging and readable scientific and social critique of current mental health practices. The authors are scholars, researchers, and clinicians who have written extensively about community care, diagnosis, and psychoactive drugs. This paperback edition makes Mad Science accessible to all specialists in the field as well as to the informed public.
Tarloff was never accused, tried, or found guilty of any offense. Although his motivations for the killing and assault remain uncertain, Dr. Shinback was possibly the intended target, as he was among the first mental health professionals, seventeen years earlier, to have diagnosed Mr. Tarloff as schizophrenic and have him committed to a psychiatric facility. Shortly after Mr. Tarloff’s arrest in February 2008, the court at first declared him mentally competent to stand trial. Then, it forced him
intellectual, and clinical status quo. Whether the investigators were deceiving themselves or deceiving others or both, the published STAR*D findings exemplify the sad but stark fact that an undetermined portion of psychopharmacological studies—especially those conducted by researchers who have made a successful career of promoting psychiatric drugs—cannot be trusted unless their findings are checked and rechecked (though the original data may never be available). “Mood Stabilizers”: Still
mental illness and, 8–9 misdiagnosis, 170, 199 molecular biology, 250–251, 252–253, 268 Monahan, John, 88, 108 Moncrieff, J., 246 morphine, 213, 214, 242 Most Solitary of Afflictions, The (Scull), 60–62 mushrooms, 241 Myth of Mental Illness, The (Szasz), 25, 71n6 Myth of Metaphor, The (Turbayne), 59–60 myths, 299 drug myths, 232–233 Greek, 40–41 psychiatry’s core concepts as, 136 NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), 16, 98, 279–280 National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, 16
as becoming the representative “financial payee” of the patient, providing opportunities to blackmail the patients by enforcing medication compliance or threatening to withhold monies belonging to the patient (Stein & Test, 1985, pp. 88–89). This appears to be forcing treatment on ACT patients who do not want it (pp. 91–92). Even bribery may be appropriate ACT treatment: “it might be necessary to pay a socially withdrawn patient for going to the movies in addition to buying his ticket” (Test &
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