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The authors of Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs are distressed by many well-documented excesses of the mental health system. These include the coercive ways in which people with mental disorders have sometimes been treated by professionals and the larger society, the conflicts of interests between commercial interests and clinical investigations, and weaknesses in diagnostic systems. The authors react to the troubling observations by writing a book that puts U.S. mental health care and research on trial. In this trial they question the premise that mental disorders fit the scientific disease model at all. They accuse modern mental health treatments of being no better than past quackery and suggest that much of it serves as coercive social control mechanisms for what they term as “misbehavior.” The authors accuse the nation’s mental health research enterprise that lies alongside new approaches to treatment as having been poorly conceived and incompetently executed, and as serving the economic interests of drug companies, some professions, and the research establishment. Most fundamental is the charge that mental health research and what has come to be known as evidence-based treatment are not really science. These are serious charges that should be considered carefully by those interested in mental health care in the United States. I liken the book to a trial in part because the authors go to great lengths to establish a distinction between science as it should be pursued and science related to mental health that is conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, medical schools, and drug companies. In the very first chapter of the book, there is a section that asks, What is science? The book, despite it