The Treatment Industry

Resisting 12-Step Coercion: How to Fight Forced Participation in AA, NA, or 12-Step Treatment

Stanton Peele, Charles Bufe, with Archie Brodsky

Stanton and his colleagues respond to the overwhelming use of coercive referrals to substance abuse treatment (read "12-step treatment") in the United States with a primer on the legal, ethical, and clinical aspects of such treatment. The authors find that the empirical basis for claims that 12-step treatment is useful is weak at best. Important research has found no benefits — or even negative results — from assignment to AA and related treatments, and certainly other treatments are at least as effective. Moreover, a personal resolution to participate in a particular treatment is an important component in effective therapy.

Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control

Stanton Peele

A popular book explaining the movement in America toward disease theories of behaviors and their negative consequences for law, morality, and social and individual health. Widely reviewed, largely positively, including JAMA, Health Affairs, American Health, Psychology Today, Psychiatric News, and JSA..

The Creation of Psychopharmacology

David Healy

David Healy, psychiatrist and reader in psychological medicine at the University of is a pharmacological researcher, and himself regularly prescribes psychiatric drugs, particularly antidepressants. At the same time, he takes a "big picture" look at the history of psychiatry and psychopharmacology and examines negative aspects of these pharmaceutical agents. The most prominent example of this has been Healy's claim, supported by his own research, that a small portion of those receiving antidepressants develop suicidal ideas. He has testified at a number of trials in which suicide survivors have sued pharmaceutical manufacturers of antidepressants.

All of this led to a very strange episode. Healy was offered a prominent clinical professorship at the University of Toronto School of Medicine and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. However, after Healy spoke at a Canadian conference prior to moving there, the University and CAMH suddenly jerked Healy's appointment out from under him!

In his book, Healy traces the development of psychopharmacology. Healy feels that these agents have provided benefits, but that these benefits have been greatly exaggerated for commercial reasons. Moreover (and this claim is one that his Canadian bosses cited in "firing" him), Healy cites data that admissions to psychiatric hospitals have multiplied dramatically, and schizophrenics and others with emotional disorders today spend more time hospitalized than they did a century ago! At the same time, a wide range of ordinary distress has been classified as suitable for pharmacological treatment. In order to spread these drugs, pharmaceutical companies and others simplify the causes of mental illness, and also maintain biochemical models of mental illness that are not only not proven, but have been found to be inaccurate. Perhaps Healy will rouse the psychiatric-drug industry — and all those who feed it — to reverse this long terms trend (dating from the 1950s). Perhaps it is not overstating the case to say our civilization depends on it!

Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill

Robert Whitaker

Why is there such a steady stream of anti-psychiatric literature in the United States? Nowhere else in the world has medical psychiatry — predicated on pharmacotherapy — reached such ascendance. At the same time, it is possible to argue that the American mental health industry has developed and maintained the highest level of emotional disorders (e.g., depression, schizophrenia, autism, PTSD, ADD, OCD, bi-polar, and so on), or at least their diagnosis, in the world. At the least, we in the U.S. have not produced better mental health than other countries, despite our immense pharmacopoeia and our vast spending on mental illness treatment and research. Robert Whitaker, a medical writer for the Boston Globe, joined this fray in his examination for his newspaper of the pharmaceutical industry, specifically drugs for mental illness (most notably antipsychotics), and their lack of evident success. He focussed in a hard-hitting series, in particular, on the economic incentives drug companies and researchers have for inventing positive results in clinical trials of these drugs, while ignoring their serious side effects. With this as his prod, Whitaker has further examined the history and status of modern biological psychiatry and, once again to say the least, the results are not what people hope.

Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society

Bruce Levine

One puzzling phenomenon bedevils our mental health establishment: despite our discovery of new medicines, diagnoses, treatments, and genetic causes, every major form of mental illness has increased, in most cases dramatically, in recent decades. This includes even those forms of mental illness felt most clearly to be due to inherent causes, like autism, due to their early appearance and uncontrollable manifestations. Bruce Levine takes on this gargantuan disease and cure monolith, from the pharmaceutical industry to schools to medicine to the research establishment to political institutions. Despite his own profession (clinical psychologist), Levine looks at all these new disease manifestations from a common sense perspective, like what your great-grandmother would say about them before we learned about mental illness. And this perspective tells us that we must reclaim our autonomy, community, and humanity before we can overcome our growing unhappiness, anxiety, depression, and craziness.

Selling Serenity: Life Among the Recovery Stars

Andrew Meacham

This is a Pickwickian tour of the recovery business, including treatment victims, self-important recovery gurus, recovery fads, private treatment center profiteers, and so. The author was a columnist for six years for a recovery publisher, Health Communications, for which Stanton at one time worked as a columnist (but was fired when he reviewed the Sobells' controlled-drinking controversy). The book notes that Stanton was the first sustained critic of the so-called recovery movement.