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Our Medical System Protects Wrongdoers and Punishes Whistleblowers: An Interview with Carl Elliott

Mad in America

An influential voice in bioethics, Elliott is known for his critical examination of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Elliott’s critical work in bioethics has earned him numerous accolades, including the Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media and a fellowship at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

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Systemic Insanity

Mad in America

To understand mental illness, we first need to understand what a person really is. Psychologists help people who feel bad and doctors prescribe medicine for broken brains with a lack of one or another neurotransmitter. Mental illness is usually caused by something happening. W hat is a human being?

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On Not Becoming David Foster Wallace

Mad in America

I didn’t know Wallace was a poster boy for antidepressant withdrawal because I didn’t know that antidepressant withdrawal was common, or that I would be experiencing it myself and understanding firsthand the hellish bodily and mental feelings that make one long for death, for everything to stop. There are no studies, not yet.

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Summing up the STAR*D Scandal: The Public was Betrayed, Millions were Harmed, and the Mainstream Media Failed Us All

Mad in America

As such, the scandal now serves as a historical verdict on the ethics of American psychiatry, and by extension, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). This ongoing failure can be traced back to the publication of DSM-III in 1980, when American psychiatry adopted a disease model for categorizing and treating mental disorders.

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Much of U.S. Healthcare Is Broken: How to Fix It (Chapter 2, Part 1)

Mad in America

These drugs have often become the sole treatment for a variety of behavioral health disorders including clinical depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other approved and off-label uses of these drugs. S ince the 1950s, society has witnessed an almost exponential growth in the use of antidepressant drugs (ADMs).

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Is Madness an Evolved Signal? Justin Garson on Strategy Versus Dysfunction

Mad in America

You’re also an author, and you’ve written on topics such as aging, genetics, mental representation, biological functions, mechanisms in science, and the concept of information in neuroscience. So why do we call schizophrenia a mental disorder, but not believing in conspiracy theories?

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Branding Diseases—How Drug Companies Market Psychiatric Conditions: An Interview with Ray Moynihan

Mad in America

R ay Moynihan is an accomplished health journalist and author who has won several awards for his work. For the pharmaceutical industry, the bigger and wider those diseases, the more people who can be diagnosed, and the bigger your markets are. This applies in the mental illness world and everywhere in medicine.