“Few dare to announce unwelcome truth.”
—EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE (1866)1
This book tells a history of science that leads readers to a socially awkward place. Our society believes that psychiatric medications have led to a “revolutionary” advance in the treatment of mental disorders, and yet these pages tell of a drug-induced epidemic of disabling mental illness. Society sees the beautiful woman, and this book directs the reader’s gaze to the old woman. It’s never easy to hold a belief that is out of sync with what the rest of society believes, and in this instance, it’s particularly difficult because the story of progress is told by figures of scientific authority—the APA, the NIMH, and psychiatrists at prestigious universities such as Harvard Medical School. Disagree with the common wisdom on this topic, and it seems that you must be a card-carrying member of the flat-Earth society.
But for those readers still wondering about the history told here, I offer one last story. You can read it and decide for yourself whether you are now, metaphorically speaking, in the flat-Earth camp.
After I interviewed Jaakko Seikkula at the University of Jyväskylä, he asked me to give a short talk on the history of antipsychotics to a few of his colleagues. Now, Seikkula and others at Keropudas Hospital in Tornio did not decide to use antipsychotics in a selective manner because they thought that the drugs worsened psychotic symptoms over the long term. Instead, they observed that many people did better when off them. Thus, when I spoke to Seikkula’s colleagues at the University of Jyväskylä, this notion that antipsychotics can make people chronically ill was something they hadn’t thought much about before, and at the end of my talk, one of the members of our circle asked if this could be true of antidepressants, too. He and others had been researching the long-term outcomes of depressed patients in Finland, and charting too whether they had used the drugs, and they had been startled by their results.
So, dear readers, ask yourself this: What do you think they found? And are you surprised?