Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs have skyrocketed over the last few decades. In 1985, Americans spent about $800 million a year on pharmaceuticals designed to treat diseases of the mind. By 2011, annual drug costs rose to more than $40 billion.
As American mental health care has increasingly embraced pharmaceutical solutions, psychiatry has managed to attract many critics along the way. Two such critics are clinical psychiatrist and associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dr. Lisa Cosgrove, and award winning author, Robert Whitaker.
In a new book, “Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury and Prescriptions for Reform,” Cosgrove and Whitaker team up to explore how the modern model for mental health care was born, and what can be done to change it.
“Psychiatry Under the Influence” stands apart from other mental health care critiques because it considers the drug-centric profession through an ethical lens.
According to Cosgrove, the book avoids the blame and witch hunts that typically characterize corruption, and focuses attention on the larger picture.
“The institutional corruption framework is markedly distinct from the way people typically think about corruption,” she said. “Research fraud, while it certainly happens, is not the big problem.”
“We try to outline how people in an institution—who really want to do well by society, who really want to do well by their patients—how is it that they have disseminated information and engaged in prescribing practices that are not evidence based?”
