I received a free copy from the publish in return for an honest review.

Peddling Mental Disorder explores how Big Pharma is the not so invisible hand behind the rise of mental disorders. Basically Big Pharma has a hand in every aspect of mental health. They pay for trips, dinners, straight up give money to psychiatrist in return for them to sit through a presentation showcasing their newest drugs. They decide which scientific test (while manipulating them) showing how effective their drugs are against placebos are shown and given to the FDA to approve their drugs. Ex players in Big Pharma work for the FDA. They are big advertisers in psychological medical magazines, they pay for psychiatrists to continue educating themselves, and finally the big one! They influence the DSM deciding who has a mental disorder.

The author, Lawrie Rezneck, does a great job of following the money and questioning psychiatry as a science, as well as show how some disorders came to be in the DSM and how they have expanded into vague terms to cause more people to be diagnosed. The book looks into particular disorders and explains how they might not actually be a disorder, but an undesirable behavior determined by society or an actual mental disorder that becomes vague so more people fall into that label. Lawrie proves how most of these drugs do not work and psychiatry is losing credibility. ( )

This book reminds me of Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. It posits that the majority of mental disorder is due to marketing, and based on the concept of making money. The author argues that many prescribers of medications do so because of kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies. This argument is contra the idea that mental illness is caused by brain chemistry, imbalance of chemicals in the brain, etc. It presents this opposite argument but minimizes it somewhat. The chemical imbalance idea was disproven years ago, but the idea that mental illness is caused by marketing is not as easy to prove or disprove. Reznek does a good job of presenting that side of the debate. ( )

As someone with mental health issues, I found this book to be very eye-opening. I never thought about what mental health professionals thought about the system. ( )

This is an interesting perspective of drug therapy in the United States. It lends to the strategy of medicating rather than building coping strategies or other methods of assisting a patient through an ordeal. Reznek essentially asks which comes first: the disease or the drug? ( )

An important book for anyone who has anything to do with mental health practice, whether patient or practitioner. Reznek has his own blindspots and seems to prefer docile patients, but he beautifully demystifies the US' short-sighted reliance on drugs rather than therapy. I wouldn't want Reznek to be my doctor, but I'm grateful to him for having written this book. ( )