Why psychiatric medication is bad

Certainly, a key role of the U. Food and Drug Administration FDA is to review findings from clinical drug trials that pharmaceutical companies provide to them, and then decide if a drug can be approved for sale. The FDA publicly releases records from these reviews and, in , we mined them to help write Inner Compass Initiative's summaries about the safety and efficacy of psychiatric drugs. During this process, though, what kept striking me was how unsafe and outright dangerous many psychiatric medications are.

Benzodiazepines can cause intense physical dependence within weeks. Antipsychotics can cause diabetes, permanent motor dysfunction, catatonic states, and death. If blood levels are not maintained within a very narrow range, common doses of lithium can suddenly become lethal. Anticonvulsants can cause life-threatening rashes — and life-threatening seizures during withdrawal. And on and on the examples go. I started to wonder: How does the FDA actually decide if a psychiatric drug is "safe enough" or not for general use?

Under what conditions is a psychiatric drug considered too dangerous to approve? I was also struck by how short most of the clinical trials submitted to the FDA were — usually only a matter of weeks or a few months. Does that provide enough information about the safety of a drug, especially when many people take these drugs for years?

Some of Dr. Stone's own scientific papers can be found here. I submitted some of my questions in advance, and Dr. Stone began by addressing my over-arching question about how the safety of drugs is evaluated by the FDA.

He said the process is much less clear cut compared to how the effectiveness of a drug is measured. But safe is a relative concept. It has to do with risk and benefit. It's basically, 'We do think there are situations in which the benefits outweigh the risks. Of course, how "effective" a psychiatric drug is or is not, and in what ways, is worthy of its own discussion — but for this interview, I was most interested in how the safety of drugs is evaluated.

For information on effectiveness, see " How Outcomes are Measured in Psychiatric Research " or any of ICI's mini-booklets on the main classes of psychiatric drugs. Stone pointed out that many psychiatric diagnostic categories often encompass very different kinds of experiences and wide ranges of intensity. For example, some people who call themselves depressed may be experiencing a troubling reduction in enjoyment, and others may be experiencing frequent suicidal feelings. Consequently, the degrees of risk or harm from an antidepressant that might be considered reasonable by FDA evaluators or anyone else varies equally widely.

Because of these complexities, the FDA tends to leave key aspects of safety evaluating to physicians and patients to work out for themselves. A positive effect on some area of concern Those are clinical questions And it's often an individualized thing. In some ways, the FDA's position is understandable: A drug aimed at a terminal illness, after all, might come with high levels of risk — but some people would consider the mere possibility of temporarily delaying death worth virtually any trade-off.

On the other hand, though, when considering a psychiatric drug choice, many of us probably don't consider the fact that the FDA may have weighed the drug's risks against the premise that depression, anxiety, inattentiveness, vacillating moods, or inner voices might in extreme scenarios contribute towards some kind of fatal outcome.

I remarked to Stone on how often we hear that psychiatric drugs are " safe and effective ". The FDA regulates whether a drug company is allowed to say that a drug is an "effective" treatment for a particular condition — and the U. Department of Justice sometimes sues companies for using the term "effective" inappropriately. But what about use of the term "safe"? Whitaker: I know that many people find meditation helpful. I also know other people find it difficult—and even threatening—to sit with the silence of their minds.

We concluded that the research on this is not as robust as one would like. However, I think your question leads to this broader thought: People struggling with their minds and emotions may come up with many different approaches they find helpful. But the individual has to find his or her way to whatever environmental change that works best for them. Horgan: Do you see any progress toward understanding the causes of mental illness?

The Adverse Childhood Experiences study provides compelling evidence of how traumas in childhood—divorce, poverty, abuse, bullying and so forth—exact a long-term toll on physical and mental health.

Racism exacts a toll. So too poverty, oppressive working conditions, and so forth. You can go on and on, but all of this is a reminder that we humans are designed to respond to our environment, and it is quite clear that mental distress, in large part, arises from difficult environments and threatening experiences, past and present.

Shelter, good food, meaning in life, someone to love and so forth—if you look at it from this perspective, you can see why, when those supporting elements begin to disappear, psychiatric difficulties appear. Horgan: Do we still have anything to learn from Sigmund Freud?

Whitaker: I certainly think so. Freud is a reminder that so much of our mind is hidden from us and that what spills into our consciousness comes from a blend of the many parts of our mind, our emotional centers and our more primal instincts. I read Freud when I was in college, and it was a formative experience for me. What do you think? In other words, American-style capitalism, which works to create markets for products, provides an incentive to create mental patients, and it has done this to great success over the past 35 years.

Society gets a free pass. With our American-style capitalism, we now have a grossly unequal society, with more and more wealth going to the select few, and more and more people struggling to pay their bills. That is a prescription for psychiatric distress. Whitaker: That is something Mad in America has reported on. The pandemic, of course, can be particularly threatening to people in mental hospitals, or in group homes. The threat is more than just the exposure to the virus that may come in such settings.

People who are struggling in this way often feel terribly isolated, alone, and fearful of being with others. COVID measures, with calls for social distancing, can exacerbate that.

I think this puts hospital staff and those who run residential homes into an extraordinarily difficult position—how can they help ease the isolation of patients even as they are being expected to enforce a type of social distancing?

Horgan: If the next president named you mental health czar, what would be at the top of your To Do list? But from my perch at Mad in America, here is what I would like to see happen in our society. As you can see from my answers above, I think the fundamental problem is that our society has organized itself around a false narrative, which was sold to us as a narrative of science. In the early s, we began to hear that psychiatric disorders were discrete brain illnesses, which were caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, and that a new generation of psychiatric drugs fixed those imbalances, like insulin for diabetes.

That is a story of an amazing medical breakthrough: researchers had discovered the very chemicals in our brain that cause madness, depression, anxiety or ADHD, and they had developed drugs that could put brain chemistry back into a normal state. Given the complexity of the human brain, if this were true, it would arguably be the greatest achievement in medical history.

And we understood it to be true. But what can be seen clearly today is that this narrative was a marketing story, not a scientific one. It was a story that psychiatry, as an institution, promoted for guild purposes, and it was a story that pharmaceutical companies promoted for commercial reasons. Science actually tells a very different story: the biology of psychiatric disorders remains unknown; the disorders in the DSM have not been validated as discrete illnesses; the drugs do not fix chemical imbalances but rather perturb normal neurotransmitter functions; and even their short term efficacy is marginal at best.

As could be expected, organizing our thinking around a false narrative has been a societal disaster: a sharp rise in the burden of mental illness in our society; poor long-term functional outcomes for those who are continuously medicated; the pathologizing of childhood; and so on.

What we need now is a new narrative to organize ourselves around, one steeped in history, literature, philosophy, and good science. I think step one is ditching the DSM. We need a narrative that, if truth be told, can be found in literature. Novels, Shakespeare, the Bible—they all tell of how we humans struggle with our minds, our emotions and our behaviors.

That is the norm; it is the human condition. And yet the characters we see in literature, if they were viewed through the DSM lens, would regularly qualify for a diagnosis. At the same time, literature tells of how humans can be so resilient, and that we change as we age and move through different environments.

We need that to be part of a new narrative too; our current disease-model narrative tells of how people are likely going to be chronically ill.

How do we bring nature back into our lives? How do we create a society that helps provide people with meaning, a sense of community, and a sense of civic duty? How do we create a society that promotes good physical health, and provides access to shelter and medical care?

Furthermore, with this conception in mind, individual therapy would help people change their environments. You could encourage walks in nature; recommend volunteer work; provide settings where people could go and recuperate, and so forth.

This is an approach, by the way, that can be helpful to people who have suffered a psychotic episode. And that really is the mission of Mad in America. Can Psychiatry Heal Itself? Meta-Post: Posts on Mental Illness. What outreach are doing for these people? What is the Amen clinic doing to help people get off their benzodiazepines before having a spect? I agree with the above comments. It seems like treatment for the elite special ones who have the money and special situations only.

Please correct me if I am wrong. I have always been intrigued by brain scans. I wish I could afford it too. I kept thinking, eventually it would get cheaper. I agree that medications affect everyone differently and basic exercise, healthy diet and talking to a mental health professional has a proven record for success. I think everyone should have access to what is proven to work.

What is being done to offer scans at a price everyone can afford? They have an unsubscribe button and you just published you email on anopen forum for everyone to see. The cost of the Spect scan and interpretative visit along with not accepting any insurance plans is a huge barrier for someone who desperately needs your help.

Please investigate targeted Individuals. Many continue to suffer from this horrific crime. Make it affordable Amen clinics. I agree with all of these comments. To hold out hope when the cost is hopeless is contradictory at best and cruel at worst. My son would have been much better off to pitch his in the trash. My own GP told me that these patients do this because the side effects really can be that bad. My son was in the neurology section of a big university and nothing helped, so he ended in the psychiatry section.

That group changed his meds on the spot, no tapering! He went into fugue states and all, with police involved. It was awful. So he swore off everything and at least knows where he is!

We have a visit scheduled for my 16 year old daughter coming up next week. When I looked at the price breakdown of the services, I truly feel the cost of the scans, treatment and follow up is almost exactly what we are paying out of pocket already for MEDIOCRE psychiatric care with little to no results after 3 YEARS……So, my husband who is an emergency room physician and I decided to give it a shot.

Nothing has really worked. So, we are borrowing money to get some help from Amen clinics. And, as I said, we have spent tens of thousands trying desperately to find a solution…. They have been unsuccessful and at times made him very sick. RSS feed for comments on this post. Name required. Mail will not be published required. November 12, Share:. Comment by Shar — January 10, AM I believe the focus of concern was that the original prescribing provider evaluated, diagnosed and prescribed these medications in only 7minutes!

Comment by generic user — January 10, AM Thank you to both the above comments.