Mania

David Healy "has vaulted to prominence as a fierce critic of standard professional practice; of the role of Big Pharma – the collective name for large pharmaceutical companies – in reconstituting the very terms in which we as a culture understand and respond to mental illness; and of the biobabble that these days has replaced psychobabble as the verbal camouflage for our ignorance about the aetiology of mental illness."

"Along the way, he has exposed the extraordinary venality of many leading academic psychiatrists; the widespread ghostwriting of what purport to be cutting-edge publications in major journals (apparently produced by eminent scientists but actually concocted by public relations flacks for the pharmaceutical houses); the routine suppression or gross misinterpretation of data on the effects of psychoactive drugs along lines which maximize the profits of the huge multinationals (who thereby extract obscene sums from the sufferings of the mentally ill); the heightened risk of suicide and other untoward events that, perversely, may accompany the ingestion of antidepressants; and the fraudulent “science” on which many contemporary understandings of mental disorder rest."

"Small wonder that for many Healy has become a professional pariah, and that he plausibly reports being hounded, menaced and attacked by the enormously powerful corporations whose profits he threatens."

Andrew Scull reviews Healy's latest book, Mania, in The Times.