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Anatomy of an Epidemic by the journalist Robert Whitaker is an important book; it is also a disturbing one. In it, Whitaker examines the socioeconomic forces that have transformed the field of academic psychiatry from the halcyon days of psychoanalysis to its return to its roots in somatic medicine. The book is a polemic—a rhetorical tour de force that condemns the exaggerated claims of biological psychiatry, while drawing attention through interviews with patients and families to the potentially nightmarish consequences of the medicalization of psychiatry.
A latecomer to allopathic medicine, academic psychiatry has always been ill at ease with the ambiguities that inhere to psychology. With the introduction of the major antipsychotics in the 1960s, followed in short order by generations of antidepressants, anxiolytics and atypical antipsychotics, academic psychiatry perceived the opportunity to claim a place in medicine through the time-honoured process of accurate diagnosis and specific treatment.
Unfortunately, as Whitaker points out, there is little convincing evidence to suggest that psychiatric disorders are comparable to those encountered in medicine; instead, constellations of symptoms tend to blur, conditions of