Mad in America was the title of investigative journalist Robert Whitaker's first book. Whitaker's second book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, proposes that there is not and has never been any evidence that commonly used psychiatric prescriptions actually work over the long-term.

This HN submission was from 2 days ago: Psychiatrists Must Face Possibility That Medications Hurt More Than They Help (scientificamerican.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13186201

The Scientific American article says, essentially, that "Maybe Robert Whitaker is right..."

I am not anti-psychiatry, I am opposed to treating symptoms instead of causes. My friend would be doing much better if her psychiatrists would prescribe useful drugs (naltrexone, thyroid, B-vitamins, etc), instead of harmful ones.

You can't launder your biases away by putting them behind the abstraction barrier of what the government or what drug companies are willing to fund. That's how you end up with p-hacking. Better to acknowledge that the reason people do science is to do things with science, not because they find sound research intrinsically fulfilling, and that everyone and every funding agency brings their biases, their hopes and dreams for society, with them.

More like, profit-driven. If we want to get better, we have to stop allowing a class of society to profit from the sickness. Pharmaceutical companies exist not to make anyones lives better - they exist to generate profit.

I'm highly suspicious of the drug-taking culture, as it attempts to justify the enslavement of the individual by way of supplanting their supposed mental-health problems with a very profitable subscription to a proprietary/patented/owned drug formula. I think it is very sad to read this HN article and listen to all the stories of folks who think they are improving their lives with this chemical dependency, and it is really tragic that drug-taking is such a cultural phenomenon that anyone who dares to rise above the field and say "hey, maybe we don't need to do this - maybe there is another way" gets cut down to serve as fodder for the rest of the poppies.

Its quite possible that we've all been swindled by our own hubris. Its happened before. The Romans had their lead pipes, the Victorians their laudanum, and we - "modern" society - have our Prozac and Zoloft. Dare to mention alternative means of lifting oneself out of the mire, and you will incur a great deal of wrath - such is the investment in the propaganda from the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry in capturing the subject and making sure nobody dares think otherwise to their drug-delivery supply chains...