The publishers say:
“This edited volume provides an answer to a rising public health concern: what drives the over-prescription of psychiatric medication epidemic? Over 15% of the UK public takes a psychiatric medication on any given day, and the numbers are only set to increase. Placing this figure alongside the emerging clinical and scientific data revealing their poor outcomes and the harms these medications often cause, their commercial success cannot be explained by their therapeutic efficacy.
Chapters from an interdisciplinary team of global experts in critical psychopharmacology rigorously examine how pharmaceutical sponsorship and marketing, diagnostic inflation, the manipulation and burying of negative clinical trials, lax medication regulation, and neoliberal public health policies have all been implicated in ever-rising psycho-pharmaceutical consumption.
This volume will ignite a long-overdue public debate. It will be of interest to professionals in the field of mental health and researchers ranging from sociology of health, to medical anthropology and the political economy of health.”
A review in the Daily Mail says:
“More Britons than ever are taking antidepressant drugs — prescriptions for the most common type, known as SSRIs (serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors), rose by 165% between 1998 and 2012.
But a controversial new book, The Sedated Society, claims these drugs, said to correct a chemical imbalance in the brain, are the wrong thing to give to emotionally vulnerable people — adults or children.
In an excoriating assessment of the drug industry and psychiatry, experts claim the evidence for antidepressants is flawed and say the drugs have never been shown to correct a chemical imbalance.
Yet millions are being prescribed drugs that are potentially extremely harmful …”
The book’s chapters include:
- Psychopharmacology Is Not Evidence-Based Medicine, by Dr. Peter Gøtzsche.
- Starting Young: Children Cultured into Becoming Psycho-Pharmaceutical Consumers—The Example of Childhood Depression, by Dr. Sami Timimi.
- Opium and the People: The Prescription Psychopharmaceutical Epidemic in Historical Context, by Dr. Joanna Moncrieff.
- Desperate for a Fix: My Story of Pharmaceutical Misadventure, by Luke Montagu.
- Neuroleptic (Antipsychotic) Drugs: An Epidemic of Tardive Dyskinesia and Related Brain Injuries Afflicting Tens of Millions, by Dr. Peter Breggin
You can get more information (and a free preview) from here.
You can order a copy from here.
