Content area
Full Text
Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial . By P. C. Gøtzsche . (Pp. 372; ISBN: 978-87-7159-623-6 Soft cover.)Copenhagen : People's Press , 2015.
Book Review
The Danish physician Peter C. Gøtzsche has written a crushing criticism of psychiatry which should be read by all with an interest in mental health and contemporary treatment of people who struggle - Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial. It will be hard to find a more important and disheartening book.
Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial is a continuation of Gøtzsche's crushing criticism of the pharmaceutical industry, Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime (Radcliffe Publishing, 2013), which actually won first prize in the British Medical Association's book award 2014 in the category 'Basis of Medicine'. However, in the new book it is not only the pharmaceutical industry which is in focus, but also the discipline of psychiatry. Gøtzsche does not have too much good to say about psychiatry and its treatment of patients, and he urges major revolution of this discipline. The criticism is first and foremost directed at psychiatry as a system, in the way it is governed by leading psychiatrists in close contact with the pharmaceutical industry. That psychiatry is a kind of 'problematic discipline' in medicine has long been clear to me; however, that the situation is actually as bad as Gøtzsche painstakingly documents that it is, you will hardly believe until you have read the book. He is obviously not critical of any psychiatrist or person working in psychiatry, and cites a number of exceptions it is emcouraging to read about.
As head of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, Gøtzsche is concerned with 'evidence-based medicine', and he refers to empirical grounds that the use of psychotropic drugs (psychiatric drugs) do far greater harm than benefit. He documents that psychotropic drugs kill over half a million people each year in the United States and Europe among people over 65 years. This makes psychotropic drugs to the third cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Gøtzsche explains how society can reduce its current consumption of psychotropic drugs by 98% while improving patients' mental and physical health - and survival. Reduction of drugs should be done slowly because withdrawal symptoms can be severe, long-lasting and dangerous.
Gøtzsche presents a number of...