To ensure we offer contemporary continuing education opportunities, the CE credit associated with this video is no longer available, however, the video remains available for viewing.According to conventional histories of psychiatry, the arrival of Thorazine in asylum medicine in 1955 kicked off a psychopharmacological revolution. Yet, since 1955, the disability rate due to mental illness in the United States has risen more than six-fold. Moreover, this epidemic of disabling mental illness has accelerated since 1987, when Prozac, the first of the second-generation drugs arrived on the market. A review of the long-term outcomes literature for psychiatric medications reveals why this is so. The medical model paradigm of care, which emphasizes continual use of psychiatric medications, is a failed paradigm, and needs to be dramatically rethought.
Review Robert Whitaker’s biographical statement.