“Psychosis does not live in the head. It lives in the in-between of family members, and in the in-between of people," Salo explained. "It is in the relationship, and the one who is psychotic makes the bad condition visible. He or she 'wears the symptoms' and has the burden to carry them.”

“The cocktail she took usually included a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, and a benzodiazepine for anxiety, although the exact combination was always changing. One drug would make her sleepy, another would give her tremors, and none of the cocktails seemed to bring her emotional tranquility. Then, in 2001, she was put on an anti-psychotic, Zyprexa, which, in a sense, worked like a charm. "You know what?" she says today, amazed by what she is about to confess. "I loved the stuff. I felt like I finally found the answer. Because what do you know. I have no emotions. It was great. I wasn't crying anymore.”

“I have always been told that a person has to accept that the illness is chronic," she says, at the end of our interview. "You can be 'in recovery,' but you can never be 'recovered.' But I don't want to be on disability forever, and I have started to question whether depression is really a chemical thing. What are the origins of my despair? How can I really help myself? I want to honor the other parts of me, other than the sick part that I'm always thinking about. I think that depression is like a weed that I have been watering, and I want to pull up that weed, and I am starting to look to people for solutions. I really don't know what the drugs did for me all these years, but I do know that I am disappointed in how things have turned out."Such is Melissa Sances's story. Today it is a fairly common one. A distressed teenager is diagnosed with depression and put on an antidepressant, and years later he or she is still struggling with the condition. But if we return to the 1950s, we will discover that the depression rarely struck someone as young as Melissa, and it rarely turned into the chronic suffering that she has experienced. Her course of illness is, for the most part, unique to our times.”

“Recovery on the med model requires you to be obedient, like a child," she explains. "You are obedient to your doctors, you are compliant with your therapist, and you take your meds. There's no striving toward greater intellectual concerns.”

“The off-drug patients also suffered less from depression, blunted emotions, and retarded movements. Indeed, they told Carpenter and McGlashan that they had found it "gratifying and informative" to have gone through their psychotic episodes without having their feelings numbed by the drugs. Medicated patients didn't have that same learning experience, and as a result Carpenter and McGlashan concluded, over the long term they "are less able to cope with subsequent life stresses.”

“We have been focusing on the role that psychiatry and its medications may be playing in this epidemic, and the evidence is quite clear. First, by greatly expanding diagnostic boundaries, psychiatry is inviting and ever-greater number of children and adults into the mental illness camp. Second, those so diagnosed are then treated with psychiatric medications that increase the likelihood they will become chronically ill. Many treated with psychotropics end up with new and more severe psychiatric symptoms, physically unwell, and cognitively impaired. This is the tragic story writ large in five decades of scientific literature.”

“If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden teenager into a lifelong mental patient?”