Robert Whitaker appears on the Psychophobia podcast hosted by Dr. Michael Montgomery.
“The former head of the American Psychiatric Association once called Robert Whitaker “a menace to society.” Bob says he’d put it on his gravestone. In this conversation, Michael traces the through-line from the unlikely apprenticeships that taught Bob to take seriously the people most of the world had discounted – driving a New York cab with no partition in the late 1970s, working the overnight desk at an SRO hotel, running a tutoring program inside Attica prison after the riots – to the 1998 Boston Globe investigation where he found himself holding two irreconcilable narratives: one from the experts, one from the patients. The book that followed, Mad in America, did something simple and unforgivable. It took the patients’ story seriously, followed the data, and found that the data agreed with them. They walk through the World Health Organization’s own cross-cultural findings, the Harvard study showing long-term outcomes had declined, the Harrow-Jobe data Bob brought back to the researchers themselves, and the central tragedy his decades of work circle back to: a model of care that transforms what could be episodic difficulties into lifelong chronic conditions.
The good news, Bob argues, is that the official narrative has collapsed in the research literature. The bad news is that prescribing practices haven’t.”