Robert Whitaker is an American journalist and author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic. He gave this lecture in Cork on 14 March 2011, invited by the schools of nursing & midwifery and aplied social sciences, in association with the Irish Network of Critical Voices in Mental Health and sponsored by the Irish Institute of Mental Health. In it he provides a critique of medical model approaches to the treatment of mental ill health and in particular of psychiatric medication.