eighteen months compared to 74% of neuroleptic treated. This is additionally evidenced by the fact that when Thorazine was introduced in 1955 there were 267 thousand schizophrenia patients in state and county mental hospitals, and eight years later, there were 253 thousand, thus indicating that the advent of neuroleptics barely budged the number of hospitalized patients. What he argues actually cleared the asylums was the beginning of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. These programs provided federal subsidies for nursing home care but no such subsidy for care in state mental hospitals, and so the states, seeking to save money, began sending their chronic patients to nursing homes. Psychiatric drugs Whitaker acknowledges that psychiatric medications do sometimes work but believes that they must be used in a "selective, cautious manner. It should be understood that they’re not fixing any chemical imbalances. And honestly, they should be used on a short-term basis." Whitaker traces the effects of what looks like an iatrogenic epidemic: the drugs that patients receive can perturb their normal brain function. Whitaker suggests that the "wonder drug" glow around the second generation psychotropics has long since disappeared. He views the "hyping" of the top-selling atypical antipsychotics as "one of the more embarrassing episodes in psychiatry's history, as one government study after another failed to find that they were any better than the first-generation anti-psychotics." Whitaker speaks warmly of Open Dialogue, an organisation of care documented by professor psychologist Jaakko Seikkula at Keropudas Hospital in Tornio in Lapland where drugs are given to patients only on a limited basis. According to Whitaker, the district has the lowest per capita spending on mental health of all health districts in Finland. Children Whitaker sees that children are vulnerable to being prescribed a lifetime of drugs. As the author says, a psychiatrist and parents may give a child a "cocktail" to force him or her to behave. Then when this child reaches the age of eighteen, Whitaker says the child often becomes a disabled adult. Review of data and statistics Whitaker spent a year and a half researching for this book, and maintains a website listing some relevant studies. Reception and media coverage Whitaker did interviews with Salon and The Boston Globe during the release of this book. He also did a book tour, and he spoke for an hour and a half on C-SPAN where there is an archived video. A review