Top Highlights

• In 1999, U.S. surgeon general David Satcher neatly summed up this story of scientific progress in a 458-page report titled Mental Health. The modern era of psychiatry, he explained, could be said to have begun in 1954. Prior to that time, psychiatry lacked treatments that could “prevent patients from becoming chronically ill.” But then Thorazine wa...
• Thorazine, wrote University of Toronto professor Edward Shorter, in his 1997 book, A History of Psychiatry, “initiated a revolution in psychiatry, comparable to the introduction of penicillin in general medicine.”
• “The meds isolate you. They interfere with your empathy. There is a flatness to you, and so you are uncomfortable with people all the time. They make it hard for you to get along. The drugs may take care of aggression and anxiety and some paranoia, those sorts of symptoms, but they don’t help with the empathy that helps you get along with people.”
• “The thing I remember, looking back, is that I was not really that sick early on. I was really just confused. I had all these issues, but nobody talked to me about that. I wish I could go off meds even now, but there is nobody to help me do it. I can’t even start a dialogue.”
• Cathy believes that this is a question that psychiatrists never contemplate. “They don’t have any sense about how these drugs affect you over the long term. They just try to stabilize you for the moment, and look to manage you from week to week, month to month. That’s all they ever think about.”