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Psychiatry Under the Influence

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Book cover The Sedated Society

Abstract

This chapter starts by identifying how, in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) adopted a “disease” model when it published the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM III). This gave rise to two “economies of influence”—pharmaceutical money and psychiatry’s own guild interests—that biased the APA and academic psychiatry toward privileging psycho-pharmaceutical treatments. This bias led psychiatry, as an institution, to confuse the public about what had become known about the biology of mental disorders and the safety and efficacy of its drugs, to inflate diagnostic boundaries in ways that created expanded markets for psychiatric drugs and to produce biased clinical care guidelines. All of this has led to social injury, as societies have organized their care around a false narrative, which has been presented to the public as a “scientific.” There is a pressing need for societies to address the outcomes of this, which will require neutralizing the two “economies of influence” that have so biased academic psychiatry in the United States and abroad and have driven year-on-year prescribing increases.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Robert Whitaker

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  1. Robert Whitaker
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Life Sciences, University of Roehampton, London, United Kingdom

    James Davies

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Whitaker, R. (2017). Psychiatry Under the Influence. In: Davies, J. (eds) The Sedated Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44911-1_7

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