in the remarkable healing powers of time, natural resilience, exercise, family and social support, and psychotherapy—and much less automatic faith in chemical imbalance and pills.

Seven percent of Americans are now addicted to a legal psychotropic drug.23 Prescription drug abuse has become a bigger problem than illicit drug abuse. If there is a conceivable way to sell a new diagnosis so that people will incorrectly believe they have it, drug companies will have figured it out and will do it successfully—if sometimes

For a significant percentage of people with mild or transient symptoms, SSRIs are nothing more than very expensive, potentially harmful placebos.

Mental disorders should be diagnosed only when the presentation is clear-cut, severe, and clearly not going away on its own. The best way to deal with the everyday problems of living is to solve them directly or to wait them out, not to medicalize them with a psychiatric diagnosis or treat them with a pill.

Disease mongering cannot occur in a vacuum—it requires that the drug companies engage the active collaboration of the doctors who write the prescriptions, the patients who ask for them, the researchers who invent the new mental disorders, the consumer groups that advocate for more treatment, and the media and Internet that spread the word.

poppers. One out of every five U.S. adults uses at least one drug for a psychiatric problem; 11 percent of all adults took an antidepressant in 2010;1 nearly 4 percent of our children are on a stimulant2 and 4 percent of our teenagers are taking an antidepressant;3 25 percent of nursing home residents are given antipsychotics.4 In Canada between

Evidence of diagnostic inflation is everywhere. There have been four explosive epidemics of mental disorder in the past fifteen years. Childhood bipolar disorder increased by a miraculous fortyfold50; autism by a whopping twentyfold51;

research. But they have also had the very harmful unintended consequence of triggering and helping to maintain a runaway diagnostic inflation that threatens normal and results in massive overtreatment with psychiatric medication.

Almost three fourths of the 11 percent of the U.S. population now taking antidepressant drugs have no current symptoms of depression.