By Steve Sommers
Tom Cruise really wasn't the best person to make the case forthe overuse/misuse of psychiatric/psychotropic drugs. The wayhe's been behaving lately, it looks like he might be badly inneed of the aforesaid drugs himself, you know, because of theway he's been getting snippy with interviewers and jumping upand down on every couch he can find. C'mon, Bud, sure yourfiancee's hot, but calm down. You're going to have a lifetime toenjoy her hotness. So, cool it already.
It doesn't help anything that Cruise is a Scientologist, a'religion' that many consider extremely wacky. Scientologists,I've heard, like to pretend that they're talking to the ghost ofa dead carpenter while they're performing cannibalism on hiscorpse. Wait. That's Christianity. Never mind.
Okay, maybe I don't know what Scientologists believe, becauseI've only heard bad things about them and I kind of think thatthe people who've been saying those bad things have an agenda oftheir own.Scientologists do (according to Cruise) believe thatmind control drugs like Ritalin, and antipsychotics are overusedor maybe should not be used at all. Ihave to confess that I onlysaw the soundbite of the Cruise interview wherehe was tellingMatt Lauer that he - Matt - did not know the history ofpsychiatry and then accused Lauer of being glib. That might notbe the adjective I would choose for this guy, but okay.
The problem is that there is indeed a very good case to be madethat psychiatry in America is misusing drugs, but the caseshould be made by gray haired, middle-aged doctors and not bythe sexiest man alive. Tom may indeed be very well read andknowledgeable on the subject, but he has zero credentials and -I'm sorry to say - ripped abs just don't cut it in this type ofdebate.
A very good book on the subject is Toxic Psychiatry (I don'tknow the author). It's very convincing, highly footnoted, wellresearched and fascinating in a very horrifying way. It goesinto things like lobotomies, electroshock and stuff like that,then shows how the new class of neuroleptics have successfullyreplaced those other two techniques, forthe most part. But notin a good way. Another good one is Mad in America which explorethe mental health treatment history in the United States. It waswritten after the World Health Organization did a study andfound that the mental health outcomesfor patients in third worldcountries was considerably better than it is presently in theUnited States. (Hint. It has a lot to do with that Toxicpsychiatry stuff).
Finally, there's an older book called Confessions of a MedicalHeretic which goes into problems with the medical establishmentin general. Those last two books I don't know the authors for,either.
Have those books read by Monday. I expect two typed,double-spaced pages for each of them.
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