James Davies

The figures are startling. At least one in four of you in the UK and US will suffer from a mental disorder in a given year.*

That is what the psychiatric industry tells us – we are a population on the brink. And that is why it asserts that its services are more essential than ever before

This is the official story we hear, the one gaining airtime in the media, the ear of National Health Service (NHS) policy-makers, and widespread dissemination through celebrity chat-shows and popular magazines. But what if the actual truth about psychiatry were not so sanguine or clear-cut as we have been led to believe? What if there is another more insidious story to be told, one that threatens all of our preconceptions?

Once upon a time, psychiatry was reserved for only the most distressed members of society. This was always a small minority: people who were often removed to asylums, usually against their will, and subjected to esoteric treatments. Today, the few have become the many. Not because psychiatric wards have increased in number, but because psychiatric treatments and beliefs about mental distress have now crashed through the walls of the hospital and surged into every corner of contemporary life, affecting how we understand and manage our emotional lives.

Today, psychiatry’s power and influence is far from abating – it’s growing at a remarkable rate. And in this book I will show you why this is, paradoxically, a very bad thing for our mental health.

I will investigate three medical mysteries: why has psychiatry become the fastest-growing medical specialism when it still has the poorest curative success? Why are psychiatric drugs now more widely prescribed than almost any other medical drugs in history, despite their dubious efficacy? And why does psychiatry, without solid scientific justification, keep expanding the number of mental disorders it believes to exist – from 106 in 1952 to 374 today? What is going on?

To answer these mysteries, I will leave no aspect of the industry unexamined. Each chapter will focus on a different part of the story: how the process of creating new diagnostic categories regularly strays from scientifically accepted standards; how antidepressants actually work no better than placebo (sugar) pills for most people; how negative drug trials are routinely buried and research is regularly manipulated to convey positive results; how numerous doctors have been enticed by huge rewards from pharmaceutical companies into creating more disorders and prescribing more pills; and how mass-marketing has been unscrupulously employed to conceal from doctors, patients and the wider public the ethical, scientific and treatment flaws of a profession now in serious crisis.

recent decades many areas of psychiatry have become so lured by power and money that they are in danger of putting the pursuit of pharmaceutical riches and medical status above their patients’ well-being

part of the experiment they individually presented themselves at different psychiatric hospitals dotted around the United States. Each academic then told the psychiatrist on duty they were hearing a voice in their head that said the word ‘thud’. That was the only lie they would tell; otherwise, from that point on they would behave and respond completely normally

The experimenters thought they would be in for a couple of days and then be discharged, but they were wrong. Most were held for weeks, and some in excess of two months. They could not convince the doctors they were sane.