This is the story of the high-income partnership between psychiatry and drug companies that has created an $80 billion psychotropic drug profit center. But appearances are deceiving. How valid are psychiatrists diagnoses and how safe are their drugs? Psychiatrists tell us that the way to fix unwanted behavior is by altering brain chemistry with a pill. But unlike a mainstream medical drug like insulin, psychotropic medications have no measurable target illness to correct, and can upset the very delicate balance of chemical processes the body needs to run smoothly.
Nevertheless, psychiatrists and drug companies have used these drugs to create a huge and lucrative market niche. And they ve done this by naming more and more unwanted behaviors as medical disorders requiring psychiatric medication. But should these really be called diseases? So the question is: How did psychotropic drugs, with no target illness, no known curative powers and a long and extensive list of side effects, become the go-to treatment for every kind of psychological distress? And how did the psychiatrists espousing these drugs come to dominate the field of mental treatment?