Robert Whitaker

And there have been others who have talked about the Uniparty.

I mentioned a book that came out in the early 80s entitled The New Right Papers, edited by a man named Robert Whitaker.

And of course, he had written another book entitled A Plague on Both Your Houses, which was getting into this kind of American resentment for the Uniparty and the establishment.

And if you go back to the late 19th century and you hear people like R.L. Dabney talk about the distortion of conservatism by northern conservatives, and you get this populist push, people like Tom Watson.

The perspective that I have an issue with is this kind of conventional approach that is just going to jump straight to medications and act like that's the only solution and that that's always going to be a lifelong solution.

The book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker is a really... really great book on this topic and it just highlights the long-term issues with these and goes into a lot of detail explaining how they can actually rewire the brain and that's where my concerns come from with long-term use and with not trying to get to to get to the root causes instead uh

yeah and um I know of an individual who switched antidepressants and wound up attempting suicide.

So not only does that to me reveal a danger in the care that needs to be had, extreme care when making decisions like switching medications.

And so she recommended that I read a book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, a book that fundamentally changed how I thought about psychiatric drugs, long-term outcomes, and the stories we tell about mental illness.

My guest today is its author, Robert Whitaker, and this conversation gave me an opportunity to revisit those questions with the person whose work first opened me up to them.

Robert Whitaker is an investigative journalist and the author of five books, three examining the history of psychiatry.

His 2010 book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness, won the U.S.

Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for Best Investigative Journalism.

So I'd encourage you to dive in, take notes, maybe listen even two or three times.

And if it was helpful for you, if it opened up a doorway, a new perspective, a new thought, I would ask that you please share it with a friend.

All right, folks, without further ado, I bring you this conversation with Robert Whitaker.

I'll link it in show notes.

But suffice it to say that a book I read in twenty ten by Robert Whitaker called Anatomy of an Epidemic really set off a cascade of awakening bells, [chuckles] okay, for me, alarms for me, and prompted me because it was just the right time, it was the right messenger, it was the right personal moment because I had just put my Hashimoto's thyroiditis diagnosis into remission.

And you would think that I would have been so excited, but I was irate.

I was rageful that I was never told in my expensive, tedious, stressful, arguably even traumatic medical training that you could put a recidivistic illness into remission through, what? Lifestyle change.

It's like you're just playing whack-a-mole except it escalates the whole time.

And I did an interview with Robert Whitaker many years ago about his great book, which is terrifying and important to read, called Mad in America.

I'm sure he's got an update to it since.

It's been quite a while ago now, which is the basic argument that, you know, when we got antibiotics, death from infections went down a lot.

Those elites, the Uniparty, which is what they all complained about, which you go back to the 60s was being complained about, all of it.

You go back to, there's a book by Robert Whitaker, The New Right Papers.

It's all about the Uniparty.

Or also he wrote a book, A Plague on Both Your Houses, which again was all about the Uniparty.