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In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker reveals an astounding truth: Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries, and quite possibly worse than asylum patients did in the early nineteenth century. With a muckraker's passion, Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. Tracing over three centuries of "cures" for madness, Whitaker shows how medical therapies have been used to silence patients and dull their minds. He tells of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices of "spinning" the insane, extracting their teeth, ovaries, and intestines, and submerging patients in freezing water. The "cures" in the 1920s and 1930s were no less barbaric as eugenic attitudes toward the mentally ill led to brain-damaging lobotomies and electroshock therapy. Perhaps Whitaker's most damning revelation, however, is his report of how drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed their studies in an effort to prove the effectiveness of their products. Based on exhaustive research culled from old patient medical records, historical accounts, numerous interviews, and hundreds of government documents, Mad in America raises important questions about our obligations to the mad, what it means to be "insane," and what we value most about the human mind.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Mentally ill, Treatment, Psychology, Schizophrenia, Nonfiction, Care, HistoryShowing 3 featured editions. View all 3 editions?
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Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
April 15, 2003, Perseus Publishing
Paperback
in English
0738207993 9780738207995
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Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
December 24, 2001, Perseus Publishing
Hardcover
in English
0738203858 9780738203850
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Book Details
First Sentence
"A VISITOR TO THE "mad" wards of Pennsylvania Hospital at the turn of the nineteenth century would have found the halls astir with an air of reform."
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Feedback?July 22, 2019 | Edited by MARC Bot | remove fake subjects |
July 22, 2017 | Edited by Mek | adding subject: In library |
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