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Robert Whitaker. Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2002. xviii + 334 pp. $U.S. 27.00, $Can. 41.50 (0-7382-0385-8).
Written by a medical journalist, Mad in America is purportedly a history of the failed treatment of the severely mentally ill in America from colonial times to the present. I use the term "purportedly" because the book is overwhelmingly a prosecutorial brief designed to prove that psychiatric treatments since the eighteenth century have been a disaster that has only worsened the condition of patients diagnosed as schizophrenic, while fostering the illusion that psychiatry was a scientific medical specialty. The only exception was early nineteenth-- century moral treatment: created by English and American Quakers as an alternative to harsh medical therapeutics, this humane therapy was appropriated, distorted, and transformed by asylum doctors concerned with protecting their jurisdiction and asserting medical dominance. The resulting science of psychiatry ushered in "a truly dark period in American history" (p. 38) that persists to the very, present.
In a series of well-written chapters, Robert Whitaker traces the travails...