Anatomy of an Epidemic

 

In 2022, I read Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. To say that I was skeptical would be an understatement. I started this weighty discourse ready to debunk the author’s claims. After all, we’ve had psychiatric medicines for years – surely they are helpful to the millions of Americans, including myself, who take them daily, right? The idea that the medications that are supposed to cure us could be worse than the condition itself is unthinkable. Yet this is the very concept Robert Whitaker is presenting.

It did not take long for my skepticism to evolve into outrage as I read case study after case study in which patients were very obviously misdiagnosed and over-medicated. The book also revealed how these psychotropic drugs were discovered in the first place, and why the concept of a “chemical imbalance” is not only a misnomer, but an out-and-out lie. By the time I got to the end of this book, I was determined to get off my prescribed antidepressants and to convince my family members to do so as well.

This week’s podcast is the beginning of an exploration of this profoundly disturbing book. We started recording and realized, almost two hours into the episode, that we had barely touched on the subject and would need to break it into multiple installments, as we did with the series on Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth in 2022. It’s a lot of information, but I hope you’ll stick with us. I promise it will be worth it in the end. It might just change your life. It has certainly changed mine.