Why is psychiatry such big business? Why are so many psychiatric medications prescribed - 47 million prescriptions for antidepressants in the UK alone last year - and why, with no solid scientific justification, has the number of mental disorders increased from 106 in 1952 to 374 today?

The everyday difficulties and obstacles of life are now medicalized into illnesses requiring treatment - usually with highly profitable drugs. Psychotherapist James Davies uses his insider knowledge to illustrate for the general public how psychiatry has placed wealth and medical status above the well-being of patients.

The list of accusations is damning: negative drug trials often concealed, antidepressants working as well as placebos, research regularly manipulated to produce positive results, doctors lured by lucrative gains from pharmaceutical companies creating more disorders and prescribing more drugs, as well as ethical, scientific, and therapeutic flaws unfairly hidden behind mass marketing.

"Cracked" reveals for the first time the true human cost of an industry that, in the name of helping others, has in fact helped itself.

Pages: 336, Dimensions: 13x13cm