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Title: Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy by Joe Sharkey ISBN: 0-312-10421-9 Publisher: St Martins Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 1994 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Corruption of Psychotherapy
Comment: This is a truly shocking book. In terms of content, it could be said that there is nothing new under the sun: the psychotherapy industry is greedy and corrupt. Plenty of writers from Masson onwards, have revealed to us the real motivating factors for many mental health professionals: greed and narcissism. But even the harshest cynic will be horrified by the details contained in this work. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written. Excellent.
Rating: 4
Summary: The title of the book says it all
Comment: The focus of this book is on how corporate, for profit, mental hospitals put aside all ethical concerns and took advantage of distressed people that sought mental health, addiction treatment, or crisis counseling. As the author described it:
"These hospitals devised vast promotional programs -- aggressive advertising coupled with painstaking media manipulation and systematic kickbacks to counselors and others who might have access to troubled potential patients -- to create a whole new product niche: treatment in psychiatric wards for people who had never before been regarded as candidates for inpatient psychiatric care." (p. 11)
Much of the book is anecdotal. The accounts of various people that came into contact with corporate mental health hospitals is shocking. The reoccurring theme was that marketing was used to seek out as many people as possible and finder's fees were paid to those that referred people to the hospital. Then the hospitals would keep people in "treatment" for as long as their insurance would cover the expenses, even switching their diagnosis to extend their stay. Once the insurance money ran out, the patients were pronounced "cured." Occasionally, bounty hunters were used to "escort" people that were reported to be in need of mental health services, but only those with good insurance, of course.
One of the most important lessons this book provides is just how wrong the mental health system can get. This book serves as a reminder that even recently, psychiatrists can throw all ethical concerns out the window for money. Sadly, only treating those that had insurance coverage was a concern, and not those with genuine problems.
Rating: 2
Summary: Fact is more Fascinating than Emotion
Comment: With a minimal of original research, Sharkey relies extensively and primarily upon one of the biggest newspaper investigative projects in U.S. history, and gives it only a minimal acknowledgment. Dubbed "Profitable Addictions" and published in the Houston Chronicle, the investigative series comprised some 110 major stories over a two-year period and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Sharkey, the son-in-law of a psychiatrist who probably felt some pressure from the powerful for-profit psychiatric hospital chains, pens a near "apologia" for the industry, rather than laying out the full fascinating story as laid out by the Huston Chronicle, which impacted for-profit hospital regulation as far away as Australia, and resulted in the creation of a permanent healthcare fraud section within the FBI and a record (for the date) settlement of $375 million settlement for healthcare fraud..still the second highest fraud settlement in U.S. history. Unfortunately, the swift publication of Sharkey's book hurt the publication of other more thorough and less sappy books than Sharkey's, and thus did an actual disservice to menatal health and patient care and the reading public in telling a most fascinating yarn of pure corporate greed.
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Title: Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the New Psychiatry by Peter R. Breggin ISBN: 0312113668 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1994 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill by Robert Whitaker ISBN: 0738207993 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.50 |
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