Anatomy Of An Epidemic teaches you how to make better decisions about your mental health as it uncovers the questionable origin of medication and reveals the interesting connection between psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies.
Mental health is an increasingly hot topic. With rates of mental illness increasing every year, particularly among adolescents, we hear a lot about it. If you don’t suffer from depression or anxiety, you likely have someone close to you who does.
It’s no wonder that the amount of psychiatric drugs out there has exponentially increased since their beginning in the 1950s. But what you probably don’t know is the sketchy past behind them. These drugs, and the doctors prescribing them, are a part of a billion-dollar industry whose interest may not always be in favor of the public.
Robert Whitaker is here to expose the history of drugs used to treat mental illness in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. It will leave you wondering whether taking a cocktail of drugs is fixing the problem or making it worse.
Here are the 3 most important lessons I got about mental health from this book:
1.Psychoactive drugs weren’t originally for treating mental illness, and their introduction was without adequate trials.
2.Medication can have some nasty side effects and make you dependent on it, leaving you in a worse state than when you began using them.
3.The study and practice of psychiatry was in trouble when these drugs were first discovered, but getting a new name and a partnership with pharmaceutical companies saved it.
Are you as curious as I am about the treatment of psychological ills? Let’s begin!
