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David Healy

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The Creation of Psychopharmacology 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by David Healy (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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David Healy follows his widely praised study, The Antidepressant Era, with an even more ambitious and dramatic story: the discovery and development of antipsychotic medication. Healy argues that the discovery of chlorpromazine (more generally known as Thorazine) is as significant in the history of medicine as the discovery of penicillin, reminding readers of the worldwide prevalence of insanity within living memory.

But Healy tells not of the triumph of science but of a stream of fruitful accidents, of technological discovery leading neuroscientific research, of fierce professional competition and the backlash of the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s. A chemical treatment was developed for one purpose, and as long as some theoretical rationale could be found, doctors administered it to the insane patients in their care to see if it would help. Sometimes it did, dramatically. Why these treatments worked, Healy argues provocatively, was, and often still is, a mystery. Nonetheless, such discoveries made and unmade academic reputations and inspired intense politicking for the Nobel Prize.

Once pharmaceutical companies recognized the commercial potential of antipsychotic medications, financial as well as clinical pressures drove the development of ever more aggressively marketed medications. With verve and immense learning, Healy tells a story with surprising implications in a book that will become the leading scholarly work on its compelling subject.

ISBN-13

978-0674006195
Edition

1st
Publisher

Harvard University Press
Publication date

30 March 2002
Language

English
File size

4219 KB
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Review

[N]o one has described it more thoroughly, or elucidated the critical intersections between psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry more clearly. -- Morgan T. Sammons ― Contemporary Psychology

This book is a good place to start if you want to get an overview of the role of drugs in the treatment of mental illness...[Healy] capture[s] an important current dilemma. -- Richard Restak ― Washington Times

Psychiatrists and historians owe a debt to David Healy. Over the years he has conducted interviews with all the leading figures in psychopharmacology...Drawing on these interviews and his wide reading of the scholarly literature, Healy has now constructed a subtle and compelling narrative of the development of psychotropic drugs...Healy ambitiously relates the emergence of drugs to the wider culture and shows how the two have interacted...[He] has written a highly stimulating and original book, which is brimful of ideas and deserves to be read and debated throughout the psychiatric community and beyond. -- Allan Beveridge ― British Journal of Psychiatry

[T]his sweeping history of medicine used to treat mental illness takes on the psychiatric and medical establishment...Healy does groundbreaking work...The Creation of Psychopharmacology details how psychiatric medication intersects with academic squabbles and popular culture. -- Janice Paskey ― Chronicle of Higher Education

David Healy is one of the founding historians of psychopharmacology, first with his three-volume series of interviews with the first generation of psychopharmacologists, and secondly with his brilliant book, The Antidepressant Era. Now Healy crowns these achievements with this breathtakingly original and important history of the antipsychotics, psychiatry's flagship drugs. In their short lifespan they have revolutionalized psychiatry, converting it from a medical specialty based on psychotherapy to one based on biochemistry. Yet as Healy's analysis shows, commerce has been as influential as science in this transformation--perhaps more so. For its originality, readability, and wisdom, The Creation of Psychopharmacology is the most important contribution to the history of psychiatry since Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious. -- Edward Shorter, University of Toronto, author of A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac

David Healy is a respected historian of psychiatry who has written a book that should spark a major debate. He identifies current trends towards the abandonment of independent research into treatments for mental illness, the demand for Randomised Control Trials as the only acceptable measure of whether a treatment works, and the chilling control pharmaceutical companies now exert over psychiatry...This is an important and thought-provoking book...Healy's warning that, without a debate, we may be moving into an era when cosmetic psychiatry will be the new liposuction is worth heeding. -- Julie Wheelwright ― The Independent

About the Author

David Healy is Reader in Psychological Medicine at North Wales Clinical School and a former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002OSXSBE
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press; 1st edition (30 March 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4219 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 469 pages

Customer Reviews:
5.0 11 ratings

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David Healy

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David Healy, born in Dublin, is a Professor of Psychiatry in McMaster University Canada, previously in Bangor and Cardiff Universities in Wales, UK.

He happened to be in the right/wrong place when the SSRI antidepressants came along bringing in their wake suicides, homicides, sexual dysfunction, birth defects and other problems - all initially hidden by a lack of access to research data, by ghostwriters and the hypnotisability of doctors. He had the good fortune to be surrounded by colleagues who got stuck into nailing down what is happening to medicine and after the setting up of RxISK.org in 2012 to find that there were a great many people who had been injured by treatment who were better at medical research than he was.

His work on the history of physical treatments in medicine and the adverse effects of treatment in based on interviews with key players in developing our current treatments and well as those who have been harmed by them

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5 out of 5

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kent peterson

On time and in decent shape

Reviewed in the United States on 25 May 2022

Verified Purchase

Price was good

hexedd

Excellent and Informative History of an Important Subject

Reviewed in Canada on 14 June 2014

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This is an excellent book, and one that I believe everyone should read. Healy crafts an important narrative about how psychopharmacology began with good intentions, controlled largely by clinicians and universities, and was then co-opted by rising pharmaceutical companies that devised sneaky (and sometimes downright deceptive) manners in which to work within the law while effectively defining new illnesses for which they could provide the fix.

Perhaps Healy's most important point is that while industry (in this case big pharmaceuticals) will aim to provide a product that will alleviate or control psychiatric symptoms, their goal first and foremost is to create a larger profit margin. Thus, being accountable to shareholders, rather than the universities or clinicians that they have increasingly funded, "big pharma" acts in ways that often run counter to what the ostensible goal of psychiatry has been over the past one hundred years, i.e. finding pathologies and cures for mental illnesses.

Healy brilliantly shows how as the pharmaceutical industry grew in size and influence, the tacit goal became not to find a specific cure for specific illnesses, but to market drugs that were effective across a wide range of disorders to sell more product. Perhaps the most insidious part of the story is that in doing so, big pharmaceuticals devised ways to co-opt psychiatrists and university departments in order to define "new" illnesses of dubious character that they could then provide a fix for. ADHD stands out as one of the "star" illnesses that was, based on Healy's persuasive and varied evidence, created by companies. By controlling the evidence, and in many cases using ghost-written studies, they have been able to act within the FDA regulations while ignoring more effective medications simply because they are *too* specific and therefore less profitable.

The second main thread in Healy's narrative revolves around how psychopharmacology has over the past forty to fifty years been involved in the creation of a "biomedical self." Healy argues, quite persuasively, that as well as the 1960s being an era of liberation, it also created a more muddy definition of "health." Healy makes a strong point that as cosmetic pharmacology and surgeries have developed, it has been more difficult to define what illness is, and perhaps most importantly, our sense of self is tied directly to health matters and now largely defined by biomedical corporations.

Healy's work is an important one. It is far more than simply a "whistleblower's" account. This book provides an eye-opening history of how psychopharmacology in the early twenty first century is no longer in the hands of clinicians and researchers, but rather the companies that fund them. Perhaps the most ironic part of this history is that as health matters have become increasingly more technological and therefore more expensive, universities and other funding bodies that formerly controlled the flow of research and science no longer have the funds to do so. Thus, mental health matters are left in the hands of those who have profit concerns at the forefront of their minds and curing illness somewhere in back, if it is there at all.

For anyone who has ever been prescribed a medication, whether psychiatric or not, this book is a cautionary tale that not only asks the reader to question what is happening with big pharmaceuticals, but also asks us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves how much we have bought in (both figuratively and literally) to the biomedical self that has been defined for us.

Lewis A. Opler

The best of times, the worst of times

Reviewed in the United States on 7 April 2014

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A remarkable view by someone who was there of the rise of modern psychopharmacology, with explanations of its progress as well as of missed opportunities due to pettiness by some and greed by others.

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