Jeffrey Lieberman’s Topple from Grace over Racist Tweet During Black History Month Spurs Closer Scrutiny

(Image: Screengrab C-SPAN2)  
This man [Lieberman] held the sentiments that shaped the department. This is a reckoning for institutional change.... I don’t trust him or the people he trained of being stewards of mental health to Black women. – Elle Lett, postdoctoral fellow in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

The psychiatrist’s research was once equated in cruelty with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on African Americans; an expert questioned if a study was a violation of the Nuremberg Code.

By CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
March 17, 2022

On February 22, 2022, prominent U.S. psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), was forced to resign as director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute over a racist and sexist comment he made on Twitter about Ms. Nyakim Gatwech, a beautiful dark-skinned American model of Sudanese descent. He questioned whether her color may be a “freak of nature,” setting off a storm of rebuke. He also wrote that Gatwech “is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the darkest skin on Earth,” which was false. In 2020, Guinness clarified that it does not monitor skin tone[1]—unlike those involved in eugenics, which psychiatry is steeped in.

But it goes deeper than a tweet. Lieberman’s controversial past also includes criticism of research in which he induced or exacerbated psychotic states in individuals, that one expert equated in cruelty to the Tuskegee syphilis studies (1932 to 1972), in which hundreds of infected black men were denied treatment with penicillin. The expert was even troubled about whether Lieberman’s study violated the informed consent provisions of the Nuremburg Code, developed as a protection after the horrific human experiments by doctors in Nazi Germany.[2]

Columbia University Department of Psychiatry suspended Lieberman in response to his tweet.[3] More than 300 media stories ran internationally about this, from The New York Times to The Business Insider in Australia and Daily Mail in the UK. Within these stories were other tell-tale signs of a psychiatrist with a questionable past. A journalist’s research had uncovered how Lieberman and other psychiatrists, exploring the biology of psychosis, had conducted experiments on more than 2,000 patients in which certain drugs were administered and other drugs withheld in the expectation of worsening symptoms.[4]

Lieberman stirred up controversy in 2015 by calling this journalist who was also the author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, a “menace to society” because his book had challenged the so-called long-term effectiveness of psychiatric drugs. It prompted the question as to whether Lieberman, in fact, was the actual menace.[5]

The Nuremberg Code states that medical experiments on human subjects “should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.”[6]

An article about Lieberman published in Counter Punch on May 29th, 2015 opined the psychiatrist had conducted so-called psychotic symptom exacerbation and provocation studies that were rebuked by ethicists. The study, known as CAFE (“Comparison of Atypicals in First Episode of Psychosis”), conducted between 2002 and 2005 on the effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs, was severely criticized by Carl Elliot, bioethics professor at the University of Minnesota. Elliott detailed how one CAFE subject who committed suicide was coerced into the study, and because of his psychotic state was incapable of giving informed consent. [7]

The Counter Punch article continued: “Nazi doctors would see nothing wrong with using human subjects to test whether hypothesized harmful agents are in fact harmful.” Further, “The Nuremberg Code states: ‘The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have the legal capacity to give consent.’ Who in their right mind would give consent for themselves or for a family member for a procedure that was hypothesized to make a patient worse?”

The study was funded by AstraZeneca. Lieberman alone disclosed having received research funding from Acadia, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Merck, Organon, and Pfizer and holds a patent related to work with Repligen. He has also served without remuneration as a consultant or on advisory boards for AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Lundbeck, Organon, and Pfizer.[8]

In 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a public apology to the eight survivors of the Tuskegee experiments, stating: “Medical people are supposed to help when we need care, but even once a cure was discovered, they were denied help, and they were lied to by their government.” The larger African American community were betrayed, he said.[9]

There’s been no such formal apology regarding the racist psychiatric research also conducted on African Americans and other minorities, such as in the 1950s at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Addiction Research Center in Kentucky. Under psychiatrist Dr. Harris Isabell, drug-addicted African Americans were given LSD, keeping some hallucinating for 77 consecutive days. At this same center in the 1960s, healthy African American men were used as test subjects for the experimental drug BZ, a military agent described as a “central nervous system depressant” 100 times more powerful than LSD.[10]

Other harmful and racist research funded by NIMH and other U.S. health agencies, included “The Violence Initiative Project” in the 1990s. On October 23rd, 1992, The New York Times reported that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was planning a five-year effort to combat violence in America “the way it would fight an epidemic of smallpox” by looking for biological or genetic markers to violence. The Times noted, “But one problem in treating violence like a disease, critics say, is that suggesting that some people are natural carriers may stigmatize blacks.”[11]

Gail Wasserman, a professor of Child Psychology at Columbia University, and Daniel Pine, a psychiatrist from the same university, were proponents of genetic racism, leading a team of researchers in performing numerous experiments, partly funded by federal dollars, on children as young as six years of age.[12] New York State Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University, was exposed in the early 1990s (before Lieberman became its director) for conducting racist experiments involving dozens of 6- to 10-year-old Black or Hispanic boys, who were given fenfluramine (a drug prescribed for the treatment of seizures) to test a theory that violent or criminal behavior may be predicted by levels of certain brain chemicals. The drug’s side effects included serious heart and lung problems, abnormal behavior, irritability, seizures, and negativism.[13]

Effects of a single dose of fenfluramine, wrote the Albany-based Disability Advocates, Inc., “frequently included anxiety, fatigue, headache, lightheadedness, difficulty concentrating, visual impairment, diarrhea, nausea, a feeling of being ‘high,’ and irritability.” The dosages administered at the Institute were eight times higher than the amounts causing damage to monkeys’ brains, even after the drug had been banned in September, 1997.[14]

In 2000, Pine moved on to become Chief of the Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience of NIMH’s Intramural Research Program. He was also Chair of the Child and Adolescent Disorders Work Group for the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5) Task Force—the edition that Lieberman released as APA president in 2013.[15]

In 2013, Lieberman was one of nine researchers studying the ethnicity and genetic ancestry of antipsychotic-induced weight gain and tardive dyskinesia (TD) in schizophrenia. Tardive dyskinesia describes a group of persistent or permanent movement disorders caused by antipsychotics and other psychiatric drugs. It can involve torturous internal agitation that drives one into constant, unrelenting motion. The study concluded that African American ethnicity helped predict the onset of antipsychotic-caused weight gain.[16]

It is of interest that in Lieberman’s book, Shrinks, he casually notes, “Psychiatrists began searching for mental illness genes in unique, geographically isolated or founder populations like the Old Order Amish and among aboriginal peoples in Scandinavia, Iceland and South Africa with all the fervor or miners headed for the Klondike gold rush.”[17]

That fervor usually ends with a prescription antipsychotic or other psychotropic drug, or the LSD and BZ experiments described above.

African Americans and other people of color have long been a target for genetic investigation. Prominent psychiatrist Eugene Brody, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and president of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) between 1981 and 1983, promoted the idea that black culture itself was a risk factor for becoming schizophrenic. “Many, if not all American Negroes appear to suffer from a series of problems in identification, stemming from culture conflict, caste restrictions, and minority status, mediated in part through the family structure…growing up as a Negro in America may produce distortions or impairments in the capacity to participate in the surrounding culture and will facilitate [cause] the development of schizophrenic types of behavior,” he said.[18]

Today, such quotes are softened to make them more palatable.  According to the APA, “Ethnic/racial minorities often bear a disproportionately high burden of disability resulting from mental disorders,” and “Lack of cultural understanding by health care providers may contribute to underdiagnosis and/or misdiagnosis of mental illness in people from racially/ethnically diverse populations.”[19] APA further states: “Black people with mental health conditions, particularly schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, and other psychoses are more likely to be incarcerated than people of other races,”[20] although it can be argued, this is not because of their condition but because of discrimination against their color.

Then comes the disingenuous statement that “only one-in-three African Americans who need mental health care receives it,” which essentially means that Blacks could be targeted to triple the numbers given psychiatric “treatment,” which the same APA fact sheet refers to as “evidence-based medication therapy.”[21] This so-called “therapy” includes severely disabling antipsychotics.

The Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) study, in which Lieberman was one of the researchers, analyzed racial-ethnic outcomes. The study included whites, African Americans (35% enrolment) and Hispanics (12% enrolment). Education level was categorized into less than high school, high school, and technical degree and above. Insurance status was categorized into none, public (Medicaid, Medicare, and veterans benefits), and private insurance. Dosing studies reported that higher doses of antipsychotics were prescribed to African Americans, while in another study, African Americans were three times more likely than non-Hispanic whites to receive depot (slow-release injections lasting weeks) antipsychotic drugs. African Americans were most likely to decide to discontinue taking the drugs, which was seen as a problem as psychiatrists want to see compliance to taking prescribed drugs. The study essentially found that the aggressively marketed new “atypical” antipsychotics did not have fewer side effects than the older ones.[22] Basically, you could be equally harmed no matter which you took.

The CATIE study used federal dollars from NIMH. Numerous pharmaceutical companies also funded it: AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Forest Pharmaceuticals, Janssen Pharmaceutica, Eli Lilly, Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Pfizer, Zenith Goldline Pharmaceuticals, Schering-Plough, and Novartis provided drugs for the studies. Lieberman alone disclosed having received research funding from AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceutica, and Pfizer and consulting and educational fees from AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Forest Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceutica, Novartis, Pfizer, and Solvay.[23]

Antipsychotics—whether old or new—are some of the most dangerous drugs in psychiatry. Lieberman conducted the CATIE study around 2000 and in 2011 co-wrote that of 1,500 subjects in the study, there was an astounding rate of up to 74% who discontinued antipsychotic “treatment” for the 18-month period of the trial. Yet, he summed up, “Antipsychotic drugs, both old and new, are clearly effective and have been a boon to the treatment of schizophrenia.”[24]

It is particularly perturbing that anyone in a clinical trial may be suddenly taken off an antipsychotic (or any psychiatric drug) to check for exacerbation of psychosis, for example.

The symptoms of antipsychotic withdrawal can include psychosis such as hallucinations or psychotic breaks. “Insomnia is also quite common. A number of people will also experience intense, brief headaches that are often described as being similar to lightning storms in the brain. Combined with all of this, people will often experience a feeling of dizziness and lightheadedness, as well as an overall feeling of shakiness, sometimes with more pronounced tremors in the extremities or on the face.”[25]

With all this, it is no wonder that any study which puts patients deliberately into drug withdrawal could be construed as cruelty. In fact, given the serious side effects of antipsychotics, it begs the question of why they are even prescribed to anyone, let alone African Americans that have been oppressed since slavery. Discontinuation must be done slowly under medical supervision—if a psychiatrist will allow it.

Despite all these findings, in 2014, a study reported that African Americans still received a disproportionate share of depot antipsychotics under Medicaid.[26] Diabetes is associated with the use of atypical antipsychotics and African Americans are especially susceptible to it.[27] Lieberman touts the virtues of the antipsychotic Clozapine (Clozaril) for “treatment-resistant” schizophrenia. One of the drug’s side effects is agranulocytosis, a severe blood disorder that is life-threatening and can lead to severe infection because the body is not making sufficient white blood cells. It requires regular blood monitoring through a Clozaril National Registry. Lieberman points out that African Americans have an approximately two-fold greater mortality risk following agranulocytosis than white patients. Despite a litany of side effects, the psychiatrist says there’s a wider range of “therapeutic benefits” compared to its associated risks.[28]

In other words, keep prescribing it.

As outlined in Counter Punch, Lieberman’s studies include:

  • “[E]arlier in his career, Lieberman conducted experiments in which patients diagnosed with schizophrenia were given a psychostimulant with Lieberman’s expectation that this drug would be ‘psychotogenic’ (induce symptoms of psychosis),” and this deterioration did occur. It was “uncovered how Lieberman and other psychiatrists, exploring the biology of psychosis, conducted experiments on more than 2,000 patients in which certain drugs were administered and other drugs withheld in the expectation of worsening symptoms.”
  • “In Lieberman’s own 1987 review of 36 studies in which psychostimulant drugs were administered to patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, he concluded that among psychostimulant drugs, methylphenidate has the greatest ‘psychotogenic potency.’ And so Lieberman, in his subsequent experimentation on patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, administered methylphenidate, the psychostimulant with greatest likelihood to do damage.” [Emphasis added]
  • In a 1990 study co-authored by Lieberman, “Behavioral Response to Methylphenidate and Treatment Outcome in First Episode Schizophrenia,” the introduction stated, “In order to examine the relationship of psychotogenic response to psychostimulants and acute treatment response in treatment-naïve, first-episode psychotic patients, we administered intravenous methylphenidate [Ritalin] to first-episode patients.” As Counter Punch explained: “patients after having a psychotic episode are administered intravenously a psychostimulant drug designed to induce more psychotic behaviors, and they become more distrustful.
  • “On the face of it, this experiment, in which a drug is administered to induce a psychotic reaction, is cruel enough. But it gets worse. Lieberman’s subjects were as young as 14 years old, and he did this experiment on ‘first-episode psychotic patients.’” Lieberman reported that the symptom of distrustfulness “significantly increased following the administration of methylphenidate.” [29]

It seems only now that the depth of concern about Lieberman is coming to light.

  • A former trainee of Lieberman said that no one was “surprised” by his remarks; “Everyone had a very low opinion of him but no one says or does anything about it.” She said he was very powerful, that “If you write a grant, he has to write the letter of support,” she added.[30]
  • Elle Lett, a postdoctoral fellow in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, was quoted: “This man held the sentiments that shaped the department. This is a reckoning for institutional change.” Further, “I don’t trust him or the people he trained of being stewards of mental health to Black women.” [31]
  • A dozen doctors called the Coalition of Concerned Analysts of Color at Columbia University sent a mass email to the psychiatric department condemning his beliefs and stating: “We do not support a department that continues to employ anyone holding them….”[32]
  • The Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons wrote to leaders at four institutions affiliated with Lieberman questioning if New York Presbyterian Hospital is safe for students and patients of color.[33]

The APA, which only a year earlier had issued a public apology for its role in more than 170 years of creating and perpetuating racism, was shockingly deficient in its response to Lieberman’s racist twitter. About its former president, the APA’s Board of Trustees issued this statement: “In the aftermath of a racist and hurtful Twitter post by a past president of the APA from earlier this week, the APA Board of Trustees reiterates its position that both racism and sexism harm the APA as an organization, the field of psychiatry, and the people and communities we serve.”[34] Under the circumstances,  harming “the people” may have been more appropriate to place first in order instead of the APA’s reputation taking precedence.

Lieberman is known for his complaints against any critic. This  prompted the 2020 CCHR report, Why Psychiatry Sees Itself as a Dying Industry: A Resource on Its Failures and Critics.

In it, it reports that Dr. Judy Stone, an internist writing in Scientific American, commented on Lieberman’s criticism of those expressing disfavor toward the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) when he released it as the APA’s president in 2013. She called his views “self-promotional and condescending,” adding that he “stoops to disparaging characterizations of critics….”

Further, “I was very disappointed to see Dr. Lieberman’s shallow, self-serving and evidence-free diatribe appear in Scientific American as a guest opinion. He failed to reveal important conflicts of interest. He made serious claims for which he presented no evidence. He has made thinly veiled personal attacks on his critics, without offering anything substantive to counter rationally.” [35]

She dissected Lieberman’s self-serving arguments:

  • Lieberman said, “Being ‘against’ psychiatry strikes me as no different than being ‘against’ cardiology or orthopedics or gynecology.” “Yes, Dr. Lieberman,” Stone said: “Psychiatry is different. These other specialties, in most cases, are far more evidence-based, with more readily measured outcomes.”
  • “Perhaps the most egregious statement in Lieberman’s opinion piece occurred when he referred to prior ethical lapses and barbaric treatment of patients, saying dismissively, ‘However, that was then and now is now.’”

Dr. Stone quipped: “…it makes me wonder if there is a DSM-5 diagnosis for someone who is self-serving, can’t accept criticism, and believes critics are prejudiced bigots?”[36]

Psychologist Dr. Philip Hickey’s 2015 comment on the psychiatrist still rings true today: “Dr. Lieberman is not receptive to the notion that psychiatrists are capable of error. He routinely lays the blame for the woes of the mental health system on politicians, insurance companies, the media, and on any other source he can think of.”[37]

In his swan song as APA president in May 2014, Lieberman opined: “As I entered the final month of my APA presidency, someone asked me how I would like this past year to be remembered. I responded that I wanted this time to be seen as ‘the year that APA got its mojo going.’ This was the year that we confronted the need for change and didn’t shrink from the challenge.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth, given the international criticism of psychiatry’s DSM-5. Wrote Dr. Hickey: “Dr. Lieberman’s reign will indeed be remembered as the year that the APA got its mojo going. But magic tricks and voodoo can’t save a sinking ship. For the past five decades psychiatrists have chosen drug-pushing as their primary professional activity. They spun a web of deceit to create the pretense that this was a medical activity. But it wasn’t; and it isn’t, and it never will be. And today they’re just a bunch of drug pushers that have hired a PR firm to clean up their image.

“Farewell, Dr. Lieberman. Thank you for making everything so clear.”[38]

In 2015, Lieberman published a video and transcript on Medscape titled, What Does the New York Times Have Against Psychiatry? in which he gave another of his diatribes against psychiatry’s critics. This time it was Tanya Lurhmann, Ph.D., a Stanford anthropologist who had written for the New York Times an op-ed article that was mildly critical of psychiatry.

Lieberman’s usual rhetoric was to lump any criticism of psychiatry into the heading “anti-psychiatry,” to which Dr. Hickey, responded, “It’s not us, Dr. Lieberman. It’s you and your psychiatric colleagues who have created something so rotten and flawed that anti is the only appropriate stance consistent with human decency.”[39]

In the final chapter of Shrinks, Lieberman says he has no illusion that “my profession has freed itself from suspicion and scorn” but that more work needs to be done. In doing so, he quoted Winston Churchill’s declaration after Britain’s triumph at the 1942 Battle of Alamein “after an extended series of demoralizing defeats.” Churchill announced to the world, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”[40]

Perhaps the more appropriate Churchill quote Lieberman should use is the statement Churchill made about psychiatrists in December 1942:

I am sure it would be sensible to restrict as much as possible the work of these gentleman, who are capable of doing an immense amount of harm with what may very easily degenerate into charlatanry. The tightest hand should be kept over them, and they should not be allowed to quarter themselves in large numbers upon the Fighting Services at the public expense.”

Dr. Lett, the earlier mentioned statistician-epidemiologist and M.D. candidate also wrote this about Lieberman’s current response to his racist outburst: “The distinction between cowardice and accountability is real simple. Have you demonstrated a deep understanding of how your actions were harmful, outlined a path for restitution, and described practices that ensure you won’t make the same mistake again, OR have you hidden from the people holding you accountable, waiting it out by ignoring their voices and protecting your own feelings.”[41]

The Task Force on Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics does not believe Lieberman has demonstrated such understanding nor remorse. As such, to take to heart Dr. Hickey’s earlier comment of “Farewell, Dr. Lieberman” and Churchill’s statement of distrust, it is time for Lieberman to retire all positions he holds in the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry, bringing an end to his reign in psychiatry.

References:

[1] “Columbia Psychiatry Chair Suspended After ‘Racist’ Tweet About Black Model,” Newsweek, 24 Feb. 2022, https://www.newsweek.com/columbia-psychiatry-chair-deactivates-twitter-account-after-racist-tweet-1681877

[2] “Who’s the Real ‘Menace to Society’? Journalist or Leading Psychiatrist?” Counter Punch, 29 May 2015, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/29/whos-the-real-menace-to-society-journalist-or-leading-psychiatrist/; “Presidential Apology for the Study at Tuskegee,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Presidential-Apology-for-the-Study-at-Tuskegee-1369625

[3] https://www.cchrint.org/2022/02/25/psychiatrists-racist-tweet-about-model-nyakim-gatwech/, citing: Lola Fadulu, “Columbia Psychiatry Chair Suspended After Tweet About Dark-Skinned Model: The post from Jeffrey Lieberman, which described the model as possibly a ‘freak of nature,’ drew negative attention from medical professionals,” The New York Times, 23 Feb 2022, Updated 24 Feb 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/nyregion/columbia-jeffrey-lieberman.html

[4] Op. cit., Counter Punch, 29 May 2015

[5] Op. cit., Counter Punch, 29 May 2015

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT00034892; Keefe RS, Sweeney JA, Gu H, Hamer RM, Perkins DO, McEvoy JP, Lieberman JA, “Effects of olanzapine, quetiapine, and risperidone on neurocognitive function in early psychosis: a randomized, double-blind 52-week comparison,” Am J Psychiatry, 2007 Jul;164(7):1061-71; McEvoy JP, Lieberman JA, Perkins DO, Hamer RM, Gu H, Lazarus A, Sweitzer D, Olexy C, Weiden P, Strakowski SD, “Efficacy and tolerability of olanzapine, quetiapine, and risperidone in the treatment of early psychosis: a randomized, double-blind 52-week comparison,” Am J Psychiatry, 2007 Jul;164(7):1050-60.

[9] https://www.learningforjustice.org/classroom-resources/texts/bill-clinton-apologizes-for-tuskegee-experiment

[10] https://www.cchrtaskforce.org/articles/mental-health-racism, citing: “Dr. Harris Isbell’s experiments,” AHRP, 18 Jan. 2015, https://ahrp.org/dr-harris-isbells-experiments/; https://pages.uoregon.edu/munno/OregonCourses/REL253F12/REL253Notes/BZStory.htm

[11] Fox Butterfield, “Dispute Threatens U.S. Plan on Violence, The New York Times, 23 Oct. 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/23/us/dispute-threatens-us-plan-on-violence.html

[12] Mitchel Cohen, “Beware the Violence Initiative Project-Coming Soon to an Inner City Near You,” Synthesis/Regeneration 19, Spring 1999, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Beware+the+Violence+Initiative+Project–Coming+Soon+to+an+Inner+City…-a071325076

[13] Philip J. Hilts “Experiments On Children Are Reviewed,” The New York Times, 15 Apr. 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/15/nyregion/experiments-on-children-are-reviewed.html

[14] Op. cit., Synthesis/Regeneration 19, Spring 1999

[15] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research/research-conducted-at-nimh/research-areas/clinics-and-labs/edb/sdan/dr-daniel-pine-biography

[16] Lai Fong Chang, Jeffrey Lieberman, et al., “Role of ethnicity in antipsychotic-induced weight gain and tardive dyskinesia: genes or environment?” Pharmacogenomics, Aug. 2013, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23930674/

[17] Jeffrey Lieberman, Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, (Little, Brown Spark, New York, 2015), p. 232

[18] Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis, How Schizophrenia became a Black Disease, (Beacon Press, Boston, 2009)

[19] “Mental Health Disparities: Diverse Populations,” APA, 2017, psychiatry.org

[20] “Mental Health Disparities: African Americans,” APA, 2017, psychiatry.org

[21] Ibid.

[22] Jodi Gonzalez Arnold, Ph.D., et al., “Comparison of Outcomes for African Americans, Hispanics, and Non-Hispanic Whites in the CATIE Study,” Psychiatric Services, 1 Jun. 2013, https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.002412012

[23] Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D., T. Scott Stroup, M.D., M.P.H., Joseph P. McEvoy, M.D., et al., “Effectiveness of Antipsychotic Drugs in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia,” New England Journal of Medicine, 22 Sept. 2005, Vol. 353, No. 12.

[24] Jeffrey Lieberman, T. Scott Stroup, “The NIMH-CATIE Schizophrenia Study: What Did We Learn?” American Journal of Psychiatry, 2011; 168:770–775

[25] B. Miller, “What Are the Symptoms of Antipsychotic Withdrawal?” The Health Board, 23 Feb. 2022, https://www.thehealthboard.com/what-are-the-symptoms-of-antipsychotic-withdrawal.htm

[26] Jonathan D Brown, et al., “State and demographic variation in use of depot antipsychotics by Medicaid beneficiaries with schizophrenia,” Psychiatric Services, Jan. 2014, 1;65(1):121-4., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24382765/

[27] Jambur Ananth, et al., Abstract, “Atypical antipsychotic drug use and diabetes,” Psychother Psychosom, Sep-Oct 2002;71(5):244-54, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12207104/

[28] Jeffrey A. Lieberman, “Maximizing Clozapine Therapy: Managing Side Effects,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 1998; Agranulocytosis – https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15262-agranulocytosis

[29] Op. cit., Counter Punch, 29 May 2015

[30] Josefa Velasquez “A Racist Tweet by Columbia Psychiatry Chair Ripples Through New York’s Elite Medical Circles,” The City, 24 Feb. 2022, https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/2/24/22949146/racist-tweet-columbia-psychiatry-chair-jeffrey-lieberman-new-york-medical-elite

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Anna Madaris Miller, “Top psychiatrist suspended after tweeting about a Black model, using the phrase ‘freak of nature,’” Insider, 24 Feb 2022, https://www.insider.com/columbia-psychiatrist-jeffrey-lieberman-suspended-tweet-black-model-2022-2

[34] “Statement from the American Psychiatric Association Board of Trustees,” 24 Dec. 2022, https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/statement-from-the-american-psychiatric-association-board-of-trustees

[35] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/03/08/resource-on-why-psychiatry-is-upset-about-its-failures-and-critics/, citing: Judy Stone, “Anti-Psychiatry Prejudice? A response to Dr. Lieberman,” Scientific American, 24 May 2013, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/molecules-to-medicine/anti-psychiatry-prejudice-a-response-to-dr-lieberman/

[36] Ibid.

[37] Philip Hickey, Ph.D., “Psychiatry’s Spin on the Navy Yard Murders,” Behaviorism and Mental Health, 3 Oct. 2015, https://www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2013/10/03/psychiatrys-spin-on-the-navy-yard-murders/

[38] Philip Hickey, Ph.D., “Dr. Lieberman’s Swansong,” Behaviorism and Mental Health, 6 May 2014, https://www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2014/05/06/dr-liebermans-swansong/

[39] Philip Hickey, Ph.D., “Why Is There An Anti-psychiatry Movement?” Behaviorism and Mental Health, 23 Mar. 2015, https://www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2015/03/23/why-is-there-an-anti-psychiatry-movement/

[40] Op. cit., Jeffrey Lieberman, Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, p. 315

[41] Anoa Changa “Columbia University Psychiatry Department Chair Jeffrey Lieberman Deletes His Account After Backlash For Racist Comment About Black Model: Maybe it’s time he ‘lived and learned’ someplace else and not in multiple positions of decision-making power and authority,” Russ Park Morning Show, https://blackamericaweb.com/2022/02/22/jeffrey-lieberman-columbia-racist-comments-black-model/