Mad in America
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Robert Whitaker |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Psychiatry |
| Published | 2002 (Perseus Publishing) |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 48779542 |
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill is a 2002 book by medical journalist Robert Whitaker, in which he examines and questions the efficacy, safety, and ethics of past psychiatric interventions for severe mental illnesses, particularly antipsychotics. The book is organized as a historical timeline of treatment development in the United States.
Mad in America received positive reviews from the general public and mixed reviews from the medical community, which criticized some bias in sourcing but nonetheless acknowledged the need to address the critical questions raised by the book regarding modern psychiatry.
Part One describes early treatments like a spinning chair which could reach 100 revolutions per minute, the Tranquilizer Chair which immobilized patients, and water therapies. Whitaker then describes moral treatment, dating back to 1793 and the French Revolution and established in the U.S. by Quakers in 1817, in which lay superintendents treated the mentally ill in small homes with great kindness and had good outcomes: About 35 to 80 percent of patients were discharged within a year, the majority of them cured. Pennsylvania Hospital reported that about 45 percent of patients were discharged as cured and 25 percent discharged as improved. In Worcester State Hospital, 35 percent were chronically ill or had died while mentally ill. Dr. George Wood, a visitor, reported in 1851:
Part Two describes the rise of eugenics which did away with moral treatment in favor of forced sterilization of the mentally ill, and led to newly invigorated fields of psychiatry and neuroscience whose experts practiced insulin coma, metrazol convulsion, forced electroshock, and lobotomy.
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