ABSTRACT
Like other “advances” in community treatment and diagnosis that we deconstruct in this book, the promises of the scientific drug treatment of distress, madness, and misbehavior rest on uncritically accepted claims, not well-tested evidence. The popular success of prescribed psychoactive drugs does not rest on scientific demonstrations of efficacy in the treatment of medical disorders. The success results from the synergistic combination of ideological, cultural, and commercial forces. Bearing down from above came shoddy science, uncritical practitioners with a monopoly on drug prescriptions, the minting of new mental disorders, ubiquitous drug marketing, co-opted regulatory agencies, and plain fraud. Surging up from below and augmented by a newly emerging health consumerism came people’s indefatigable desires for psychoactive drugs, the powerful but dismissed power of placebo, and the reverberation of myriad personal narratives of drug-induced transformation, recovery, and cure.
