RW: Well, this is sort of my second go around with this. Mad in America, you know, was sort of critical along somewhat the same lines, although this book I'd say is actually much more profoundly upsetting. You know after the first book came out there were some extraordinarily...there were some attacks, of course. I think like one psychiatrist wrote in a review -- if FOX television wants to do a television show on good journalists gone bad they can start with Bob Whitaker...there was that sort of attack. I got one review that said -- this is the most worst piece of journalism ever...that's Mad in America. Now when, to give an example, the day after Anatomy of an Epidemic was published, a doctor with close ties to the psychiatric...child psychiatric community in Boston published an unsolicited review, as far as I can tell, in the Boston Globe, which compared me to an AIDS denier and a South African dictator who had caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Now because that doctor was from a...you know, he's part of the Harvard Medical School community -- I had radio interviews cancelled, and it was basically a sign to newspapers around the country -- you do not want to review this book. So that was the blowback that began right away -- it sort of shot out of the cannon...that was number one...
Rob: Who was the doctor?
RW: A guy named Dennis Rosen. And it was a dishonest review. It said things...I responded to it -- it was just dishonest from start to finish in terms of what it said the book was about. And then, for example, someone managed to hack or somehow get into the database of a company called v-Fluence, and what v-Fluence does...it does market intelligence work for pharmaceutical companies and basically it's set up, if a critic emerges that can...is starting to do damage to that brand, you know, they'll run, sort of, disinformation campaigns to discredit that critic. Well...
Rob: How do you spell v-Fluence?
RW: v-Fluence...V, slash, I think it's F-L-U-E-N-C-E. Anyway it came out that they had a, you know, they were keeping tabs on me and they had been keeping tabs on me for some time, and they were going to continue to monitor my activities. Now I don't really know if...it doesn't seem they've actually done anything, but there was a sense of being tracked. There's...someone set up a question board on Yahoo! -- Is Bob Whitaker a Scientologist? -- which is a way to really be libeled -- and anybody who knows me, I'm like the last person on the face of the earth who would ever be a Scientologist. I'm a guy who has just been a mainstream medical reporter who believes in scientific literature and illuminating powers of science, so you see that sort of personal attack. It's a little tough...and the most...the latest thing was I got invited to be -- how crazy this whole thing is -- I got invited to be the keynote speaker at a big conference, alternatives conference...that's a conference organized for people who are users of the medications, quote "consumers and peers"...but it's funded by SAMHSA, which is a federal agency -- so I got invited and then the government said you have to disinvite Bob, and then finally after a protest by some of the peers/consumers I was reinvited; but as part of the thing of being reinvited, I gave a keynote -- this was on Friday -- and then they brought on a psychiatrist...SAMHSA insisted that a psychiatrist be allowed then to go on stage and basically rebut me and sort of, in essence, disparage me, and I was not even given any chance to respond -- so that's an example of how sometimes difficult it is to write a book like this which is extraordinarily...it's just their evidence base....
Rob: Well it's also evidence that you're touching a nerve and you're doing something important because otherwise it....what is SAMHSA? How do you...what is that? What's is the...
RW: Well it's basically the group that is a part of Health and Human Services that provides services to those with disabilities, and sort of becomes their federal...
Rob: S-A-M-S-A? What is it...S-A-M-S-A?
RW: It's S-A-M-S-H-A, and I'm not even sure what the acronym stands for. But it's S-A-M-S-H-A I believe. So it...
Rob: So...
RW: It's part of Health and Human Services -- the federal government.
Rob: Okay.
RW: So the point of this is this...is what we really need is an honest dissemination of this information and you see it in these sort of efforts to attack the messenger. But one last thing here...and the same way there's been these, sort of, problems for me personally, it's also been extraordinarily rewarding. I'm now traveling around talking, and actually because the book is so fact-based/evidence-based, there are major providers in this country now that are starting to say -- we need to change our use of these medications...and they're getting together, etcetera; and the reason for that is simple -- they do indeed know that this paradigm of care has failed and they read Anatomy of an Epidemic, and we're talking major providers, and they say this is solid evidence-based and they can't find, in essence, others to say where I'm wrong. So it...that's the point of Anatomy of an Epidemic -- it is...I'm really just a messenger. Here is what their evidence shows about long term...about these long term chronicity that chant the early death, the physical problems, and the worsening psychiatric symptoms in very many patients. So it is having a positive effect as well, and in that sense it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done.
Rob: That's awesome. Now, and we're going to have to wrap this up soon, but I want to have you back on in the next week so that we can continue this for the next show next week. Can we do that?
RW: Terrific...yeah, absolutely.
Rob: Alright, now...and what I want to talk to you about that I really haven't yet is the FDA, the connection of health insurance; we haven't touched on ADD/ADHD and the stimulant medications at all and I know my listeners are very interested in that; I want to talk about CHADD; I want to talk about psychologists who have gone along with this whole thing as well; there's a lot more that we really need to get into in more nitty gritty, and you have a chapter on ideology that I think is really important that we have touched on a bit, but I want to cover a bit further.
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