Psychiatric drugging: Forty years of pseudo-science, self interest, and indifference to harm

The ''modern'' era of psychiatric drug treatment began with the introduction of chlorpromazine into the chaotic mental hospital setting in the 1950s as a new psychotropic agent for controlling excitement, agitation, and aggressivity. In that setting the urgency of management problems operated to shrink the complexity of the patient as a psyche-social being down to specific ''symptoms'' targeted for chemical subjugation. From this beginning - a chemically produced quieting or ''tranquilization'' - there emerged a revitalized psychiatric movement to expand the ''strictly medical'' understanding and treatment of psychological disturbance that acknowledges no limits. This state of affairs has achieved a position of dominance and respect in the mental health industry, based upon social forces operating within psychiatry as a profession and outside of psychiatry in the larger political-economic realm. The catastrophe of widespread and expanding medically-produced disease has failed to alarm psychiatry into taking stock of the determinants of the catastrophe - indeed the existence and magnitude of the tragedy is barely recognized within psychiatry. This conclusion is illustrated by detailed examination of the psychopharmacologic agents alprazolam (Xanax) and fluoxetine (Prozac).