Mental Illness and Its Treatment

A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr.

Sylvia Nasar

Russell Crowe has completed a movie, soon to be released, based on this book, which details the story of Nobel Prize winning mathematician, John Forbes Nash, Jr. Nash was only awarded the prize in 1994, at age 66, for seminal papers he wrote as a Princeton graduate student on game theory, a way of utilizing math for social scientific analysis. At 29, as an expectant father, he became psychotic, a state in which he continued for 30 years, with intermittent recovery that permitted him to continue to work. However, in his late 50s, Nash achieved remission and became aware of his delusions and ceased hallucinating. Nash eschewed medication throughout his psychosis. This is a great book to confront biological psychiatry with. Although, in fact, natural remission is quite common for mental illness, Nash's case is well-known and has been attested to by psychiatrists. Why do neurochemical imbalances right themselves? How is a gene for mental illness overcome? Do drugged psychotics recover at the same rate as non-drugged? With these and other questions as party favors, you too can inspire a spirited debate among your friends. Unfortunately, the movie felt it necessary to have, in a fictionalized Nobel acceptance speech, the John Nash character make a statement like "I take the newer medications; they don't cure me, but they help."

Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications

Peter Breggin & David Cohen

Many people feel that psychiatric medications have helped — even saved — either themselves or loved ones, and they are probably right. Nonetheless, virtually no one resolves an emotional condition purely through pharmacotherapy, and many people are not helped at all or are hurt by such medications. Here are five possible models of dysfunctional use of such medications: (1) medications do not impact the condition of concern, (2) side effects outweigh the benefits of medications, (3) medications address some symptoms and bring relief, but also prevent people from recognizing and dealing with issues they must address to achieve more substantial relief, (4) people who are helped by medications depend on them past the point where their natural recovery would allow them to function better without medications, (5) people's view that the medications have solved their problems becomes an addiction of its own. Thus, when people feel secure enough to think about themselves and their mental health anew, they need to evaluate their meds. This book is an important adjunct to such an evaluation.

From Placebo to Panacea: Putting Psychiatric Drugs to the Test

Seymour Fisher & Roger P. Greenberg (Eds.)

This book collects the latest critical clinical evaluations of psychiastric drugs, and finds claims for them vastly overstated. This volume contains the best scientific evidence that the modern investment in drug therapies — from anti-psychotics to antidepressants et al. — is really a social phenomenon that is not actually creating the cures it claims. Check out, for instance, the comparison of clinical trials in which antidepressant are compared with psychoactive placebos in doube-blind studies. The results are, well, depressing.

Prozac Backlash

Joseph Glenmullen

It was bound to occur — a response to silly and unrealistic paeans to antidepressants like Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac. This book, by a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, examines how marketing by pharmaceutical manufacturers downplays the side effects of antidepressants, while overstating their benefits. Glenmullen points out that, "When discussing brain cell damage caused by street drugs such as amphetamines, cocaine or Ecstasy, researchers speak in the gravest terms, warning of dread effects. Only when referring to prescription drugs do they suggest that pruning nerve cells might be 'therapeutic.'" As revealed at this site, antidepressants demonstrate ample signs of producing withdrawal and being addictive, which pharmaceutical companies have dealt with by developing an array of euphemisms. The only problem with this book is that, in place of antidepressant drugs, Glenmullen presents the value of a nonspecific psychodynamic therapy which has really not demonstrated efficacy. Perhaps most valuable, Glenmullen describes the array of available social, chemical (e.g., herbal), and physical (e.g. exercise) remedies for depression, as opposed to the halcyon chemical future the drug companies present in ads like the one trumpeting, "A great day for Dad. A great day for Mom. A terrific day for the family. Make it happen. The Zoloft Saturday."

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