100 books like Psychiatry Under the Influence

I found, as a history buff, The Struggle for Drug Reform to be an eye-opener about how America’s exceptionally high drug prices among other deficits in health care quality and coverage resulted from the past exercise of power by the pharmaceutical industry, the lynchpin of America’s “medico-industrial complex.”

I was impressed by historian Tobbell’s meticulously researched account of the industry’s strategic alliances with self-interested medical scientists, not just conservative political forces, and its use of anti-communist propaganda to fight off the threat of drug pricing regulations.

I personally found important her discussions of how the industry allied with the American Medical Association against universal health care, against FDA demands for evidence about drug efficacy and safety before allowing drugs on the market, and against the threat to its profits from generic drugs. 

I find Angell’s The Truth About the Drug Companies extremely valuable for teaching students about how the pharmaceutical industry translates high profits into power resources to protect and increase those profits over time.

The former New England Journal of Medicine editor exposed how drug companies enlist politicians, the FDA, and medical academia for their cause. And armies of lawyers to extend monopoly marketing rights for years.

It was my first introduction to how they spend more on marketing than research, much of that on “copy-cat” drugs of dubious superiority to ones with expired patents.

As a tax (and high drug price) payer, I was disturbed to learn how they use government funds for basic research and then rig and spin their reporting of clinical studies to inflate their products’ therapeutic value and underplay their risks. 

Kassirer, also like Angell a highly respected physician and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, first opened my eyes to how extensively drug companies use their vast wealth to turn physicians into promoters and middlemen.

I knew about the small and not-so-small gifts, speaking fees, travel junkets, and the like to individual doctors and “key opinion leaders” of the profession, but not about the “institutional conflicts of interest” gladly entered into by specialty medical societies heavily dependent on drug money for their events and activities such as scientific meetings, journal publishing, clinical practice recommendations, and, not least “continuing medical education” required by law for license maintenance.

Although Kassirer, also like Angell, proposed reforms, from what I know about conditions today, not much has changed, so On the Take remains an indispensable window into corrupted medicine. 

If you think that medical journals published by respected medical societies are full of good science, think again.

For me, Abramson’s Sickening nailed the case for a conclusion that the net effect of the many hundreds of medical journals published here and around the world is to subtract from the sum of human medical knowledge.

Abramson, as an expert witness in criminal and civil cases against drug companies, draws in part on subpoenaed documents to expose how medical science, as part of the entire medical-industrial complex, is corrupted from start to finish by the drug industry’s funding of most clinical trials, their control over the data analysis, and even their ghost-writing of articles submitted to journals.

New and disturbing was the withholding of clinical trials’ raw data from journals’ peer reviewers. Instead, they get biased summaries bearing drug manufacturers’ fingerprints.

This is the first volume of lecture notes from the infamous Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin, “inventor” of MDMA “ecstasy or molly”. Sasha and his wife Ann are well known in the world of psychedelics for their publications based on Sasha’s incredible knowledge of chemistry, Ann’s capacity to integrate experiences, and their shared contributions to the world of psychedelia. This new book, with an introduction from Mariavittoria Mangini, is a ‘warts and all’ introduction to the chemistry of mind alteration. It is highly accessible, at times comical, and a fascinating opportunity to voyeuristically sit in on a series of Shulgin lectures that promises to pique your curiosity about our chemical lives.

I found Alternatives Beyond Psychiatry to be an extremely helpful collection of reports and alternative approaches from an international cast of mental health professionals, ex-patients, lawyers, and social scientists. Peter Stastny is a psychiatrist, documentary filmmaker, and a founder of the International Network Towards Alternatives and Rights-Based Supports; and Peter Lehmann is the founder of Peter Lehmann Publishing and co-founder of the Association for Protection against Psychiatric Violence. Alternatives Beyond Psychiatry includes exciting alternative visions along with concrete self-help and approaches for professionals.

The excellent contributions to this volume tackle three critical problems in social science.

The first is the crisis of replication: research results are rarely replicated and often cannot be. The second is that theories rise and fall without adding to our understanding. The third is that the little bits of understanding that we do possess are not tied into a larger whole. I found the analysis persuasive and the writing very clear.

The recommendations, especially for greater attempts at integration, complement those that I make in my own book. 

There are far fewer works in the humanities than in social science that suggest a path toward a more productive scholarly enterprise.

Martinelli is by far my favorite book about reforming humanities scholarship. He and I disagree about the main purpose of the humanities – I stress the role that art plays in human societies, while he urges an appreciation of the great thinkers of the past, and also appreciating such values as beauty and human dignity.

Yet he makes recommendations that I applaud regarding integration, appreciating diverse theories and methods, being reflective, and pursuing clear and logical argumentation.

American economics in the Progressive Era (usually dated from the later 1800s to World War I) is quite fascinating.

Mary Furner’s book is an excellent discussion of the developing American social sciences in this period.

American universities developed rapidly along with the professionalization of the social sciences. At the same time, rapid US industrialization created a raft of new economic and social problems that demanded a response.

This created a tension between the desire for professional “scientific” standing and the demand to respond to obvious social problems by advocating for particular policy responses.

Furner pays particular attention to the work and career of economist H. C. Adams, who was a teacher to a number of the later institutionalist group. In the institutionalist literature, this tension is expressed in the conjoined goals of “science and social control.” 

For institutionalists, the solution to this problem was found in the pragmatic and instrumental… show more.

This book is now 50 years old, but its message is as relevant and important now as when it was written. In a series of witty essays that border on rants, Andreski attacks much of social science as fluff obscured by technical jargon and methodology. In particular, he laments the growth of quantitative methods as an attempt to add objectivity to social science and make it appear “harder.” True objectivity is about more than mechanical number-crunching, he says; it’s about a commitment to fairness and resisting the temptations of wishful thinking – a challenge anyone who works with data concerning people and their lives should take seriously.