Mad in America

Today I attended a Master's tea with Robert Whitaker who just wrote Mad in America about how the industry producing psychiatric drugs has run amok. I left the tea feeling pretty low about the world. Here are some points he made: - Repeated studies by the World Health Organization show that schizophrenics in developing countries do much better than in developed nations. - The psychiatric drug industry has grown from $800 million in 1987 to $23 billion today. The influence of this money runs everywhere. Careers among academics get destroyed if they do not promote the drug industry party line. Many academic centers are supported with industry money, and because of this tests are not done scientifically. He told the story of one academic who opposed the drug industry, and was told his university salary of $90,000 was going to be cut by a third. Coincidentally, a drug company offered him a job at the same time for $300,000 which he accepted. - One test of St. John's Wort, Zolaf, and a placebo showed that the two drugs were ineffective. The academics spinning the test results reported it as, "St. John's Wort doesn't work," without a single mention that Zolaf also didn't work. - Government studies always have lower success rates than industry funded studies. - Master Keil, a professor of psychology, agreed with everything Whitaker said and added his own anecdotes of academic corruption he had witnessed. - The FDA is just as bad, because many FDA officials get hired right into the industry at high salaries after their term ends. -Psychiatrists have incentive to prescribe the drugs because prescribing drugs is what distinguishes psychiatrists from psychologists and justifies their high salaries. - Whitaker also talked about how our notions of normalcy and mental illness have become so out of whack. Never in history have so many people been diagnosed as mentally ill. While he believes that there is a place for drugs, he said that humans are meant to be emotional creatures. We are supposed to feel anxiety frequently and to feel depression. I have always been wary of liberal arguments about the evilness of pharmaceutical companies. I believe that companies have a right to charge for drugs if it was expensive to develop the drugs. But dishonesty and these massive conflicts and interests and outright fraud are absolutely terrible. We seriously need to structure the drug approval process in a way that lessens conflicts of interests and separates the financial incentives from the science of what works.

Innovations in the Discipline of Children

From my History of Childhood and Education Reading: In an 1833 book, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's Record of a School, there is a school teacher who makes his pupils whip him for their own punishment. According to the teacher, "What at first they did it very lightly," Alcott demanded of his weeping pupils "if they thought that they desereved no more punishment thatn that? And so they were obliged to give it hard." Now I wonder if that was an effective disciplinary device. Would that work long term? Would it traumatize some students and turn others into sadists? Or would they all come out pacifists? Any teachers out there want to try this out:-)

Perspective

Growing up in the 90's, I was always made aware of the decline in our country's social values over the past decades. While my parents told me about the innocence of the 1950's, I witnessed the damage divorces did to friends of mine and saw kids in my supposedly nice suburban town lost to drugs. When in high school, I remember hearing a story about a group of 8th graders at a nearby middle school who had been caught running a prostitution ring for the boys. To me this was just further proof that society was getting worse every year. For my Sex and Marriage in American History term paper I've been reading City of Eros about prostitution in old New York. Scholars' best numbers show that back in 1870's New York 10% of women engaged in prostitution at some point in their life. As bad as current society can be, I doubt it's anywhere near this number. The crime rate and gang warfare then was also horrendous. I keep coming across stories in the papers of the time about young women visiting the city and getting kidnapped to be held as a sex slave or about men out with their families being accosted on the main city thoroughfares. Even the 1950's, as we have learned in this class, were more complex than people realize. I shall blog more about this in the future.

History can be fun

The two met in a low house of prostitution in that place, and Doren, jealous of the attentions which one of the inmates showed to Fitzsimmons, shot him. [Doren] was put on trial, and found guilty of willful murder. He was a desperate character, and his fate was richly deserved.

This quote comes from an 1880 National Police Gazette article I just came across while writing my history term paper. I wonder if there is any relation.