Samizdat Health Writer’s Co-operative Inc.

“A frightening and tragic story”

The story is depressing and tragic, one of many similar tales that have appeared in the past two decades. Clinicians have the skills to assess new treatments, but their independence and financial support must be assured by independent non-industry sources. Children of the Cure is a frightening and tragic story that warrants governmental and public attention. A book review by Max Fink, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology Emeritus
StonyBrook University College of Medicine

The Children of Amazon

When Samizdat published Children of the Cure on Amazon, there was discomfort in some quarters. The discomfort was practical for some. Mark Carter from Auckland told us it would take 154 NZ dollars to buy two copies and have then posted to him – he had to go through Amazon.com as Amazon.com.au for some strange reason does […]

A Journal of the Plague Year

The resonance between what is happening this year with COVID-19 and what happened and the events described in Decapitation of Care is too great to ignore. A plague helped do in Charles I of England. Then it was The Plague. It struck in 1641, primarily affecting London. As the monarch, Charles was the person who […]

“All Medicines Are Poisons” Paracelsus’s Perspective

The Decapitation of Care is a short text that takes issue with the current hegemonic thought that has elevated health technology to a position of being the new route to salvation. The starting point is that the thoughtless employment of this technology is harming people — it has started to shorten their life expectancy and has undermined healthcare and the doctor-patient relationship. David Healy, therefore, invites us to “stop doing” in a protocolized and standardized way, and stop to think.

The Zyprexa Papers: This book had to be written

The Zyprexa Papers has two interlocking parts. One centers on a set of documents relating to Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa (olanzapine), a company cash cow, which had been made available under a secrecy order to lawyers acting for hundreds of people injured by Zyprexa. The other centres on Bill Bigley, a man enmeshed in the Alaskan mental health system since the early 1980s with over 70 admissions.

If you start reading, be warned, all of your defences will be stripped away. If you think what happens to Bill Bigley could only happen in some out of way place, like Anchorage, think again… It takes a certain amount of time and distance to write a book as good as this. It also takes a certain amount of nerve. It is likely that no conventional publisher would take a risk on publishing this. All the more reason to buy The Zyprexa Papers.

RxISK Newsletter re Samizdat Launch

RxISK has just launched a writer’s co-operative – Samizdat-Health and Samizdat House – for non-fiction and fiction publications falling outside the boundaries of the sanctioned conversation on issues thrown up by health. Launching a new set of imprints like this has become necessary, because publishing about treatment-related difficulties has become increasingly problematic in a risk-averse […]

The Decapitation of HealthCare: Review

by John Dan Stone, Age of Autism, UK Editor A welcome for David Healy’s new, short polemical volume The Decapitation of Care. Healy as ever likes to express himself in terms of historical theatre — the comparison with oppressive political situations of past as well as the roots of this present oppressive situation in the […]

Manifesto As Method: Review

By Pamela Stavropoulos Author: Living under Liberalism Significantly, psychiatrist and cultural critic David Healy characterises his most recent publication, A Short History of the Rise and Fall of Healthcare as ‘the Health care Manifesto’. Defined as ‘a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer’ a manifesto is generally both a […]

Neo-Culturalism

Last week’s post introduced “neo-culturalism“. This post might add to the sense of what’s at stake and why there is a need for Samizdat – and your input to help us all work out how to grapple with what is going wrong. Two decades ago, the editors of journals were people with what was once […]

Challenging Health Totalitarianism

Samizdat Health – a writer’s co-operative that has taken shape in responses to changes in health and in publishing – will be borne this month. The original Samizdat was an underground messaging system in the Soviet Union where dissidents passed on writings – often on toilet paper. A collection of Samizdat writings is now stored […]

Health Care or Health Services?

David Healy is a Professor of Psychiatry at Bangor University. This talk explores the adverse effects of treatment, clinical trials in psychopharmacology, the history of psychopharmacology, and the impact of both trials and psychotropic drugs on our culture. David has been involved as an expert witness in homicide, suicide and birth defect legal actions involving […]

The Rise and Fall of Health Care

For two centuries, thanks to medical techniques, our life expectancy increased steadily, initially in Western settings and then globally. For the first time in two centuries, life expectancy in America fell for three years in a row. Last year in the United Kingdom life expectancy also fell. In many developed countries, it has stalled. Something […]