Robert Whitaker

Robert Whitaker, the author of Mad in America, has won numerous awards as a journalist covering medicine and science. In the past few years, he has won the George Polk Award for Medical Writing and a National Association for Science Writers’ Award for best magazine article (which appeared in Fortune). In 1998, he co-wrote a series on psychiatric research for the Boston Globe which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.  Prior to writing Mad in America, he co-founded a publishing company, CenterWatch, that covered the drug-development industry.  He also previously worked as director of publications at Harvard Medical School, and was a features/medical writer at the Albany Times Union newspaper, in Albany, N.Y.,  for a number of years.

Web: http://www.madinamerica.com 

See: Rappoport, Jon

Quotes

[2010 Aug] GUEST VIEWPOINT: It's time to end this grand experiment with psychiatric drugs by Robert Whitaker

[2010 Aug] America's Mental Illness Epidemic: It Turns Out That the Drugs Are the Problem by Gary G. Kohls, MD

[2010] Robert Whitaker Interview

[2010] Interview

[Interview 2005] Psychiatry's Untold History of Cruelty, Torture, Eugenics and Brain Damage

[Interview 2005] Psychiatric Drugs: An Assault on the Human Condition Street

AFFIDAVIT OF ROBERT WHITAKER   In summary, the research literature reveals the following:
a) Antipsychotics increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill.
b) Long-term recovery rates are much higher for unmedicated patients than for those who are maintained on antipsychotic drugs.
c) Antipsychotics cause a host of debilitating physical, emotional and cognitive side effects, and lead to early death.
d) The new "atypical" antipsychotics are not better than the old ones in terms of their safety and tolerability, and quality of life may even be worse on the new drugs than on the old ones.

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker, Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 7, Number I: 23-35 Spring 2005.

Books:
Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker