San Antonio College Library

This book examines the well-being of people with mental illness in the United States over the past fifty years, addressing issues such as economics, treatment, standards of living, rights, and stigma. Marshaling a range of new empirical evidence, they first argue that people with mental illness--severe and persistent disorders as well as less serious mental health conditions--are faring better today than in the past. Improvements have come about for...

"We have come a long way over the past few decades in our understanding of mental illness and its potential treatments. Yet, tragically, many across the country who struggle with serious mental illness are unable to find effective, quality medical treatment. As a federal commission on mental health concluded, the system of care is in shambles. But why? And how do we fix it?" "Timothy A. Kelly, former Commissioner of Virginia's Department of Mental...

In the mid- to late 1940s, a group of young men rattled the psychiatric establishment by beaming a public spotlight on the squalid conditions and brutality in our nation's mental hospitals and training schools for people with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities. Bringing the abuses to the attention of newspapers and magazines across the country, they led a reform effort to change public attitudes and to improve the training and status of institutional...

"Medical journalist Robert Whitaker... traces the treatment of mental illness through the use of lobotomies in the 1920s and 1930s, to the electroshock therapy of the 1950s, to what is perhaps his most damning revelation: drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed research to prove that new antipsychotic drugs were more effective than the old, while keeping patients in the dark about dangerous side effects. A haunting, deeply compassionate book...