By Robert Whitaker
August 13, 2022
Source: Mad in America
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
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Why a Lawsuit Is Needed
All societies need their medical communities to provide the public with honest information about what is known about the nature of an illness, and the risks and benefits of a treatment for that illness.
The chemical imbalance story of depression violated that obligation of honesty, and egregiously so. In lieu of information necessary for a depressed patient to give informed consent, patients—and the public—were told a false story that benefitted guild interests and the financial interests of pharmaceutical companies. In essence, a marketing story was substituted for a scientific one.
Mad in America has published numerous stories by people who were told they suffered a chemical imbalance in the brain, and whose lives then crashed and burned after they took an antidepressant, with so many ending up on drug cocktails. Their stories just begin to hint at the extraordinary harm done by the chemical-imbalance deception.
And yet, even as psychiatrists have said there was “nothing new” with Moncrieff’s paper, there has been no public admission of wrongdoing, or apology, for the misleading of patients and society in this way for decades. Carlat, in his comments on NPR’s On Point show, even justified it, at least to a degree, putting it into the category of a little white lie. At times, he said, psychiatric patients need to be given information about psychiatric drugs that “is not entirely accurate.”
Meanwhile, the APA just keeps on with its propaganda, telling the public that nearly all patients eventually respond well to antidepressants. That is a whopper that trumps the antidepressants-fix-chemical-imbalance story for its mendaciousness.
This is why a class-action lawsuit is needed. To this point, those promoting the chemical imbalance suffered have suffered no cost for doing so. Rather, money has been made, careers have been burnished, and all the while our society has borne the cost.
A class-action suit would serve society well. It would put teeth into the legal obligation for doctors to provide “informed consent,” and for a medical discipline to provide society with information that met this standard too.
How can such practices impact your health? Why? What is your experience?
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