Summary of Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic

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#1 As a society, we have come to believe that psychiatry has made great progress in treating mental illness over the past fifty years. We have many effective and safe treatments for psychiatric disorders.

#2 While the American Psychiatric Association claims that they have come a long way in understanding psychiatric disorders, the truth is that the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States has skyrocketed since the arrival of Prozac and the other second-generation psychiatric drugs.

#3 In 1955, there were 566,000 people in state and county mental hospitals. However, only 355,000 had a psychiatric diagnosis, as the rest suffered from alcoholism, syphilis-related dementia, Alzheimer’s, or mental retardation.

#4 The comparison between the rates of mental illness in 1955 and 1987 is an imperfect one, but it’s the best one we can make to track the increase in disability rates between those years. In 1955, there were only 50,937 people in state and county mental hospitals with a diagnosis for one of the affective disorders. But by 1987, people struggling with depression and bipolar illness began showing up on the SSI and SSDI rolls in ever-increasing numbers.

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