In this episode — Investigative journalist Robert Whitaker returns for his fourth conversation with Richard. They trace the antidepressant story from the 1980 DSM-III rebrand through the reanalysis of the largest antidepressant trial ever run, the long-term data on children and stimulants, and — at the end — what Whitaker learned from the people who actually recovered.
Guest: Robert Whitaker — investigative journalist, founder of Mad in America, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010), Mad in America (2002), and Psychiatry Under the Influence. His 1998 Boston Globe series was a Pulitzer finalist.
Chapters
* [00:00] The epidemic of isolation
* [02:20] Introducing Robert Whitaker
* [03:30] The 1980 DSM-III pivot
* [05:50] Where the chemical-imbalance idea came from
* [12:40] What the public was told instead
* [18:30] How the drugs change the brain
* [23:10] Patients who’ve been on SSRIs for years
* [27:53] STAR*D: the trial reanalyzed
* [37:01] Why the press stayed quiet
* [39:53] Children on psychiatric drugs
* [42:56] The MTA stimulant study
* [51:00] “A menace to society”
* [55:34] Why informed consent drives him
* [57:32] The connection cure
Introductory notes - the epidemic of isolation [00:00]
The mission of the program: enhancing wellbeing by making connections with the people who live near you, by face and by name. Ninety-five percent of people want to collaborate, not fight. A small group of dominated predators benefits from divisiveness. The current American epidemic is isolation, alienation, and loneliness. The antidote is connection - a theme the conversation returns to in its final movement.
Introducing Robert Whitaker [02:20]
Whitaker is an investigative journalist and the founder of Mad in America. He is the author of Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010), Mad in America (2002), and Psychiatry Under the Influence. His 1998 Boston Globe series on psychiatric research was a Pulitzer finalist. Of all the people I have interviewed in over twenty years, his work has had the greatest impact on my professional life.
The corruption of psychiatry and the DSM-III pivot [03:30]
* The forty-five-year story begins in 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association published DSM-III and adopted a disease model. Schizophrenia, bipolar, anxiety, and a new diagnosis called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder were each declared distinct illnesses.
* The profession said it knew the causes. Depression was too little serotonin. Psychosis was too much dopamine. A second generation of drugs would correct those imbalances, “like insulin for diabetes.”
* Prozac arrived in 1988 as a breakthrough that could make you feel “better than well.”
* Before DSM-III, American psychiatry felt its legitimacy as a medical specialty was under attack. DSM-III was a rebrand to position psychiatrists as medical doctors treating medical illnesses.
“It was pitched to us as a story of science, but it wasn’t a science story. It was a marketing story. It was a rebranding story for American psychiatry, which in the 1970s was feeling that its legitimacy as a real medical specialty was under attack.” — Robert Whitaker
What the science actually showed [05:50]
* The chemical-imbalance hypothesis came out of the 1960s, working backwards from drug mechanism, not from measurement of patient biochemistry.
* Tricyclics and MAOIs both upped serotonergic activity. Researchers inferred that depression might be low serotonin. Antipsychotics block dopamine receptors, so they inferred schizophrenia might be high dopamine.
* Direct testing failed. By 1978 researchers weren’t finding it. A 1984 NIMH study concluded that a lesion in the serotonergic system is not a cause of depression.
* In 1998, the APA’s own textbook declared the monoamine theory of depression dead. The profession did not tell the public (Moncrieff et al., 2022, Molecular Psychiatry).
What the public was told instead [12:40]
* Pharmaceutical ads kept selling SSRIs that “fix chemical imbalances.” The APA website told the same story. In 2005 the APA put out a press release calling psychiatrists experts in fixing chemical imbalances in the brain.
* Drug companies funded APA education programs, media training, and “key opinion leaders” at Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Penn. Thought leaders were paid hundreds of thousands, sometimes more than a million, over a few years.
* By 1998, when the New England Journal of Medicine wanted a review of antidepressants, it could not find an academic mood-disorders expert who wasn’t already on pharma payroll.
My Other Books:
* Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking
* Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear
* Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out
* Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances
* Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca
* Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)
How the drugs actually change the brain [18:30]
* Before treatment, a patient’s serotonergic system is not operating abnormally. The drug ups activity. The brain dials itself down to compensate (Hyman & Nestler, 1996, AJP).
* After long-term treatment, patients do in fact end up with a low-serotonin system, physiologically.
“The drug induces the very change that was hypothesized to cause the problem in the first place.” — Robert Whitaker
* On withdrawal, the dialed-down system can’t snap back. Patients feel terrible and conclude they are still sick.
* A University of Bristol cohort (n=222,121, 10-year follow-up, 2022) found elevated risk of coronary heart disease, cardiovascular events, and all-cause mortality among long-term antidepressant users.
What to tell patients already on SSRIs [23:10]
I described to Whitaker a patient of mine who has been on an SSRI for twenty years and no longer knows what she is without it. His answer:
* Before antidepressants became long-term care, 85% of hospitalized depressed patients recovered within a year.
* As long-term medication became standard, the one-year recovery rate dropped. By 1998, the reported stay-well figure on antidepressants was about 15%.
* A 2025 systematic review found the median antidepressant trial lasts 8 weeks. The median real-world prescription is 5 years. The science backing five-year prescribing was never built.
STAR*D - a $35 million study that became a hoax [27:53]
* STAR*D enrolled 4,041 outpatients, the largest and longest antidepressant trial ever conducted. Four chances to remit across four steps.
* Reported a 70% cumulative remission rate. Medical school curricula, the New Yorker, and the New York Times cited it.
* The protocol specified HAM-D as the outcome scale. The paper used QIDS, which the protocol explicitly said not to use.
* 931 of the 4,041 patients weren’t depressed enough at baseline to be eligible. Some scored in remission at baseline. They were counted as remitters anyway.
* The protocol said dropouts without remission were treatment failures. The researchers imputed dropouts as remitters at the same rate as those who stayed - roughly 600 imagined remissions.
* Psychologist H. Edmund Pigott obtained the protocol via FOIA, then patient-level data under the RIAT Act. Applying the registered protocol, the true cumulative remission rate was 35% (Pigott et al., 2023, BMJ Open).
* Of the original 4,041 patients, 108 were in sustained remission and still in the trial at one year. That is roughly 3%. The figure did not appear in the abstract of the 2006 AJP summary paper.
“The stay-well rate at the end of one year in the largest and longest trial of antidepressants ever conducted was 3%. We were being told of a stay-well rate of being cured of 70%.” — Robert Whitaker
* Two follow-on RIAT reanalyses extended Pigott’s work to the rest of the trial: Step 2 drug-switch arms (medRxiv, Feb 2025) and Step 2/3 augmentation arms (medRxiv, Oct 2025). Both reach the same conclusion: when you score the trial the way the protocol said, the headline numbers collapse.
The press silence on STAR*D [37:01]
* Mad in America ran a retraction campaign. Pigott sent letters to the AJP. The AJP declined.
* The AJP invited a rebuttal. The original authors called Pigott’s work “ad hoc post-analysis.” In fact Pigott had applied the registered protocol.
* In October 2024 Pigott’s team formally called on the AJP to retract five articles tied to the original analyses. None have been retracted.
* The New York Times was still citing the 70% figure in 2023.
“From a newspaper standpoint, this is being handed to them on a plate. They don’t have to dig anything up. They just have to read what the protocol says.” — Robert Whitaker
Children on psychiatric drugs [39:53]
* Before 1980, major mental disorders were understood as disorders of the mature personality. ADHD as a diagnosis was born in 1980.
* 25 to 30% of incoming college freshmen now carry a psychiatric diagnosis and a prescription.
* The Social Security Administration’s 2024 disability report: adult mental-illness disability has more than doubled since Prozac entered the market, and disability among children for mental-illness causes has risen more than thirty-fold.
“We are taking away from our kids their God-given right to try to make something of themselves, to grow up and try to settle with their mind, to come to grips with their minds.” — Robert Whitaker
The MTA stimulant study and informed consent [42:56]
* The MTA (Multimodal Treatment of ADHD) study was designed by NIMH to answer a direct question: do stimulants help kids long term?
* At 14 months, expert-medicated kids did slightly better on reading and ADHD symptoms (MTA Cooperative Group, 1999). The abstract became the story.
* By 3 years, medication status was a marker of deterioration rather than benefit. The abstract said benefits “seemed to disappear.” The data tables said worse.
* By 6 to 8 years, medicated children had greater functional impairments, worse cognitive tests, worse ADHD symptoms, and higher delinquency rates (Molina et al., 2009, JAACAP).
* The NIMH website described the 14-month benefit. It did not describe the three-year, six-year, or eight-year results.
“A menace to society” [51:00]
* Past APA president Jeffrey Lieberman called Whitaker “a menace to society, causing great harm.” Whitaker plans to put it on his gravestone.
* Whitaker’s position: he isn’t doing the research. He reads NIMH’s own work and the data tables past the smoothed abstracts.
“I’m a menace to a profession that has decided not to be an honest narrator of its own science.” — Robert Whitaker
Informed consent is the belief that motivates me [55:34]
* Whitaker’s frame is not anti-medication. It is pro-informed-consent. People have a right to know the risks and benefits, including long-term, and then to decide.
* “Drugs worsen long-term outcomes” is an aggregate claim. Individual patients can still feel better than baseline. The comparison that matters is the natural recovery rate.
The connection cure - nobody said the drug did it [57:32]
“When I spoke to people who were better, who had gotten their lives back, nobody said the drug did it. What everybody said is they made a connection with somebody.” — Robert Whitaker
* After Anatomy of an Epidemic came out, Whitaker began interviewing the people who had recovered from depression, schizophrenia, and other diagnoses once considered chronic.
* Across every interview, the same answer: connection. Somebody believed in them. They developed a relationship. Through that relationship they joined groups, worked, volunteered, brought food to the elderly.
* Julia Hotz’s The Connection Cure (Simon & Schuster, 2024) documents clinicians around the world who prescribe movement, nature, art, service, and belonging instead of, or alongside, a drug.
* What we need, in order: someone to love, someone who loves us, meaning, then exercise, shelter, and food.
Why this conversation, now
This episode follows the release of my new book, The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines (Park Street Press, May 5, 2026). The pattern American psychiatry ran with antidepressants for thirty years - reverse-engineer a theory from a drug, hand it to the public as settled science, lock the story in with guild incentives - is the pattern I do not want repeated with psilocybin, MDMA, or ibogaine. Whitaker is the journalist who taught me what the early signs look like. The book is an attempt to keep us honest about the next round before it ships.
Resources mentioned
* Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic (Crown, 2010) and Mad in America
* Pigott et al., 2023 STAR*D Step 1 reanalysis, BMJ Open
* Pigott et al., 2025a STAR*D Step 2 drug-switch reanalysis, medRxiv
* Pigott et al., 2025b STAR*D Step 2/3 augmentation reanalysis, medRxiv
* October 2024 retraction call covering five AJP articles
* Moncrieff et al., 2022 serotonin theory umbrella review, Molecular Psychiatry
* Bristol primary-care cohort, 2022
* Antidepressant trial duration vs real-world use, 2025, Journal of Affective Disorders
* Hyman & Nestler, 1996, AJP
* MTA Cooperative Group, 1999; Molina et al., 2009, JAACAP
* SSA 2024 Annual Statistical Report
* Julia Hotz, The Connection Cure (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
* Inner Compass Initiative (Laura Delano), rxisk.org (David Healy), International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal
* Richard Louis Miller, Master Your Mind and The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines (Park Street Press, May 5, 2026)
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