Handbook of Basic Pharmacokinetics..Including Clinical Applications Book

An incredible read. Moncrieff's premise (reminiscent of Thomas Szasz) is that a disease-centered model of drug action has been adopted and widely publicized, not because the evidence for it is compelling, but because it helps to promote the interests of certain powerful social groups, namely the psychiatric profession, the pharmaceutical industry and the modern state.

She systematically presents research data to support this claim for the three major types of psychoactive drugs: neuroleptics (anti-psychotics), antidepressants and mood stabilizers. In her concluding chapter, she sums up the conclusions of her efforts tellingly:
The data surveyed in this book suggest that psychiatric drug treatment is currently administered on the basis of a huge collective myth; the myth that psychiatric drugs act by correcting the biological basis of psychiatric symptoms or diseases. We have seen that for the three main classes of drugs used in psychiatry there is no evidence to substantiate this view. Instead, the evidence suggests that these drugs induce characteristic abnormal states that can account for their so-called therapeutic effects. (217)
As a consequence, we have become a society of "neurochemical selves", where millions of people worldwide are convinced they need to take psychiatric drugs to be normal.