Mad In America is the history of how people who have struggled with serious mental illnesses have been treated in the United States from the 1700s to today. Pulitzer Prize finalist Robert Whitaker takes you on a fascinating, in-depth look that encompasses America’s attempts at treatment. From the Quakers in York, PA in the 1700s, to the creation of state asylums, to the clearing of state asylums by putting residents on powerful antipsychotic medications and releasing them into communities — the journey Whitaker takes us on is fascinating to read. He also takes the reader through the different treatment protocols that patients endured in those institutions — principally designed to force physical compliance — from bloodletting to forced castration to electroshock treatment to frontal lobotomies.
The book is sobering and will lead you to question the validity and efficacy of any current approach to dealing with a mental health issue because each of the treatments listed above was funded by the leading foundations in the United States, with names like Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller on them. Additionally, each of these treatments was heralded as a “major breakthrough” by newspapers such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. As an example of how delusional ideas are given life — the inventor of the frontal lobotomy, a Portuguese neurologist named Antonio Moniz, was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine! I wish I was kidding… I’m not.
The most tragic realization one arrives at upon reading Mad in America is the human carnage that has been left in the mental health industry’s wake as it has groped its way through history.
Whitaker is a wonderful writer, and his writing reads like a novel. Mad in America is available everywhere.