Robert Whitaker (author)

Robert Whitaker is an American journalist and author, writing primarily about medicine, science, and history.

Whitaker was a medical writer at the Albany Times Union newspaper in Albany, New York from 1989 to 1994. In 1992, he was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT. Following that, he became director of publications at Harvard Medical School. In 1994, he co-founded a publishing company, CenterWatch, that covered the pharmaceutical clinical trials industry. CenterWatch was acquired by Medical Economics, a division of The Thomson Corporation, in 1998.

In 2002, USA Today published Whitaker's article "Mind drugs may hinder recovery" in its ediorial/opinion section. In 2004, Whitaker published a paper in the non-peer-reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses, titled "The case against antipsychotic drugs: a 50-year record of doing more harm than good". In 2005, he published his paper Anatomy of an Epidemic: Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America in the Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry. In his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, published in 2010, Whitaker continued his work.

He has written on and off for the Boston Globe and in 2001, he wrote his first book Mad in America about psychiatric research and medications, the domains of some of his earlier journalism. He appeared in the film Take These Broken Wings: Recovery from Schizophrenia Without Medication released in 2008, a film detailing the pitfalls of administering medication for the illness.

An IRE 2010 book award winner for best investigative journalism, this book investigates why the number of mentally ill patients in America receiving SSI or SSDI disability checks keeps rising, despite the so-called "psychopharmacological revolution." Whitaker's main thesis is that psychopharmacoligcal drugs work well to curb acute symptoms. However, patients receiving prolonged treatment courses often end up more disabled than they started. Despite these results from several landmark studies in the 1970s, in the 1980s pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lily together with the American Psychiatric Association began more aggressively pushing second generation anti-depressants and anti-psychotics on psychiatric patients. Many prominent academic psychiatrists worked as key opinion leaders for the pharmaceutical companies, and were compensated millions of dollars.

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