Robert Whitaker Quotes

#1. In the United States, people with depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia are losing twelve to twenty years in life expectancy compared to people not in the mental health system. (176)

Robert Whitaker

#2. ...all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)

Robert Whitaker

#3. If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden teenager into a lifelong mental patient? (p. 30)

Robert Whitaker

#4. Rather than fix chemical imbalances in the brain, the drugs creat them. (207)

Robert Whitaker

#5. Recovery on the med model requires you to be obedient, like a child," she explains. "You are obedient to your doctors, you are compliant with your therapist, and you take your meds. There's no striving toward greater intellectual concerns. (123)

Robert Whitaker

#6. Prior to being medicated, a depressed person has no known chemical imbalance. (81)

Robert Whitaker

#7. Psychosis does not live in the head. It lives in the in-between of family members, and in the in-between of people," Salo explained. "It is in the relationship, and the one who is psychotic makes the bad condition visible. He or she 'wears the symptoms' and has the burden to carry them." (341)

Robert Whitaker

#8. With psychiatric medications, you solve one problem for a period of time, but the next thing you know you end up with two problems. The treatment turns a period of crisis into a chronic mental illness. - Amy Upham (203)

Robert Whitaker