The Sedated Society

This edited volume assembles a team of global experts in critical psychopharmacology to address the causes and consequences of our current psychiatric prescribing epidemic. Over 15% of the UK public takes a psychiatric medication on any given day, and the numbers are only set to increase. Placing this figure alongside emerging clinical and scientific data exposing the poor outcomes and harms these medications often cause, this book reveals that their commercial success cannot be explained by their therapeutic efficacy. The chapters reveal how pharmaceutical sponsorship and marketing, diagnostic inflation, the manipulation and burying of negative clinical trials, lax medication regulation, and neoliberal public health policies have all been implicated in ever-rising psychopharmaceutical consumption. This volume will ignite a long-overdue public debate - informing clinical, academic, public and political communities about the harms of over-reliance on psychiatry drugs and the necessity for root and branch reform.