This is an amazing text on the subject of coming off psychotropic drugs. This book is for anyone who has an interest in the preparation and process of what it takes to learn to come off these drugs and live life without them. Amazing stories of many who had been led to believe they were ill and now live life outside of the constricting paradigm of mental disease. A must read for therapists, doctors, users of these drugs and their family members.

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The Icarus Project and Freedom Center's 40-page guide gathers the best information we've come across and the most valuable lessons we've learned about reducing and coming off psychiatric medication. Includes info on mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, risks, benefits, wellness tools, withdrawal, detailed Resource section, information for people staying on their medications, and much more. Written by Will Hall, with a 14-member health professional Advisory board providing research assistance and 24 other collaborators involved in developing and editing. The guide has photographs and art throughout, and a beautiful original cover painting by Ashley McNamara.

The first book in the world about the issue of successfully coming off psychiatric drugs primarily addresses people in treatment who decide to withdraw. It also addresses their relatives and therapists. +++ Millions of people are taking psychiatric drugs, such as Haloperidol, Prozac, Risperidone or Zyprexa; for them, detailed accounts of how others came off these substances without ending up in the doctor's office, are of fundamental interest. In this manual, 26 former psychiatric patients from Australia, Austria, England, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA – and for the first time, a relative – write about their experiences with withdrawal. +++ Additionally, ten professionals, working in psychotherapy, medicine, psychiatry, social work, natural healing, on the Internet and even in a runaway-house, report on how they helped in the withdrawal process. +++ With all commercially available psychiatric drugs and their trade names marketed in Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Cameroon, Canada, Ethiopia, Fiji, Ghana, Great Britain, Guyana, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Rwanda, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, the USA, Vanuatu, and Zimbabwe. +++ Authors: Karl Bach Jensen · Wilma Boevink · Michael Chmela · Oryx Cohen · Susanne Cortez · Gábor Gombos · Katalin Gombos · Bob Johnson · Maths Jesperson · Kerstin Kempker · Susan Kingsley-Smith · Fiona Dale Milne · Mary & Jim Maddock · Eiko Nagano · Mary Nettle · Una M. Parker · Pino Pini · Marc Rufer · Lynne Setter · Martin Urban · David Webb · Josef Zehentbauer · Katherine Zurcher · and many more

Updated with bonus material, including a new foreword and afterword with new research, this New York Times bestseller is essential reading for a time when mental health is constantly in the news. In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Interwoven with Whitaker’s groundbreaking analysis of the merits of psychiatric medications are the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. As Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, other societies have begun to alter their use of psychiatric medications and are now reporting much improved outcomes . . . so why can’t such change happen here in the United States? Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public? Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up. Praise for Anatomy of an Epidemic “The timing of Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic, a comprehensive and highly readable history of psychiatry in the United States, couldn’t be better.”—Salon “Anatomy of an Epidemic offers some answers, charting controversial ground with mystery-novel pacing.”—TIME “Lucid, pointed and important, Anatomy of an Epidemic should be required reading for anyone considering extended use of psychiatric medicine. Whitaker is at the height of his powers.” —Greg Critser, author of Generation Rx

This book overturns the idea that psychiatric drugs work by correcting chemical imbalance and analyzes the professional, commercial and political vested interests that have shaped this view. It provides a comprehensive critique of research on drugs including antidepressants, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers.

An updated edition of the classic history of schizophrenia in America, which gives voice to generations of patients who suffered through "cures" that only deepened their suffering and impaired their hope of recovery Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries. In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. The widespread use of lobotomies in the 1920s and 1930s gave way in the 1950s to electroshock and a wave of new drugs. In what is perhaps Whitaker's most damning revelation, Mad in America examines how drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed their studies to prove that new antipsychotic drugs were more effective than the old, while keeping patients in the dark about dangerous side effects. A haunting, deeply compassionate book -- updated with a new introduction and prologue bringing in the latest medical treatments and trends -- Mad in America raises important questions about our obligations to the mad, the meaning of "insanity," and what we value most about the human mind.