If reading the news and watching TV advertisements for psychotropic drugs makes you wonder if Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, you’re not alone. In a New York Times book review, Marcia Angell, a former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, talks about how a shocking 46 percent of Americans now fit a diagnosis for some form of mental illness.
“What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing?” she asks. The authors of three books she’s reviewed have posed some interesting – and alarming – answers.