‘The Sedated Society: The Causes and Harms of our Psychiatric Prescribing Epidemic‘ (Palgrave Macmillan 2017)
Pharmaceutical Use in the UK
Over 15% of the UK and 20% of the US adult population take a psychiatric medication, aka pharmaceutical, on any given day, and the numbers are only set to increase. When these figures are set against data exposing the pharmaceutical abuse, poor outcomes and harms these medications often cause, it becomes apparent that their commercial success is not due to their therapeutic efficacy.
The book reveals how pharmaceutical sponsorship and marketing, diagnostic inflation, the manipulation and burying of negative clinical trials, lax medication regulation, and neoliberal public health policies have all been implicated in ever-rising psycho-pharmaceutical consumption. As increasing sedation of society may be leading to a more disabled society, this book closes by calling for total reform.
“’The Sedated Society’ is a provocative critique of the over-prescription psychiatric drugs, their minimal effectiveness, and the dangers they pose. The authors are eminent experts and their conclusions are important and troubling. It should be required reading for all medical students.”
—Prof Irving Kirsch, Associate Director at the Harvard Medical School
The book is edited by Dr James Davies (co-founder of Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry in UK). It contains chapter contributions from a team of global experts, including Joanna Moncrieff, Peter Kinderman, Peter Breggin, Sami Timimi, Peter Gøtzsche and Robert Whitaker.
Copies of the book on pharmaceuticals can be ordered from Amazon US here: https://www.amazon.com/Sedated-Society-Causes-Psychiatric-Epidemic/dp/3319449109/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487336349&sr=8-1&keywords=the+sedated+society
Interested in Alternatives to Pharmaceutical Prescriptions?
IMHU has 30 courses on effective alternatives. Our mission is to inform the public about the variety of effective alternatives to psychiatric medications so that those searching for them do not have to review the literature themselves but have qualified help and qualified resources. Go to https://imhu.org/shop to see what we offer.