 He has won numerous awards for science writing, and in 1998 he was part of a team writing for the "Boston Globe" that was shortlisted for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a series of articles questioning the ethics of psychiatric research in which unsuspecting patients were given drugs expected to heighten their psychosis.He is the founder and publisher of Mad in America, a webzine critical of the modern psychiatric establishment.Whitaker was a medical writer at the "Albany Times Union" newspaper in Albany, New York from 1989 to 1994.