Books by David Healy

Life Expectancy in the West has been falling since 2015. Linked to this, the climate of healthcare has become toxic. This crisis, as urgent as global climate change, has its roots in the same factors that drive climate change. Shipwreck of the Singular looks at our changing environment through a healthcare lens rather than an economic one. One advantage to this is that each of us is better placed to put right what is going wrong in the climate of healthcare than we are to tackle the global climate. In tackling what needs changing in health, we may solve our wider climate crisis. This book does not come with recommendations from people of distinction, or experts who have turned a blind eye to developments that have landed us in the mess we now have. The people best placed to grasp what is going wrong and force our ''betters'' to justify the distinctions that have been bestowed on them are those whose lives have been touched by what is going wrong in healthcare. Shipwreck shows you how we got to the point of peril we are now at. It points to a Care that needs courage. A book won''t get us there. It needs you to engage and engage others.

This is a collection of interviews with 25 leading figures in the field of psychopharmacology - mind altering drugs. The interviews cover the history and development of the major drugs in the field as well as their marketing usefulness.

This searing indictment, David Healy's most comprehensive and forceful argument against the pharmaceuticalization of medicine, tackles problems in health care that are leading to a growing number of deaths and disabilities. Healy, who was the first to draw attention to the now well-publicized suicide-inducing side effects of many anti-depressants, attributes our current state of affairs to three key factors: product rather than process patents on drugs, the classification of certain drugs as prescription-only, and industry-controlled drug trials. These developments have tied the survival of pharmaceutical companies to the development of blockbuster drugs, so that they must overhype benefits and deny real hazards. Healy further explains why these trends have basically ended the possibility of universal health care in the United States and elsewhere around the world. He concludes with suggestions for reform of our currently corrupted evidence-based medical system.

The first complete account of the phenomenon of antidepressants, this authoritative, highly readable book relates how depression, a disease only recently deemed too rare to merit study, has become one of the most common disorders of our day-and a booming business.

The Psychopharmacologists 3 completes a trio of interview-based books about the process of therapeutic innovation in clinical psychiatry.

Healy follows The Antidepressant Era with an even more ambitious and dramatic story: the discovery and development of antipsychotic medication. Once pharmaceutical companies recognized their commercial potential, financial as well as clinical pressures drove the development of ever more aggressively marketed medications.