I AM MAD AS HELL
I got mad at my therapist yesterday. I hadn’t seen him since I read Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic and watched my world slipped off its axis.
My therapist has read my book. He knows how my daughter and I were lead so deeply into the mental healthcare industry by the well-informed doctors running world-renown hospitals and clinics throughout this country. He kept nodding. Yes. Yes, he knows that there is no scientific evidence that brain chemistry is the root of all mental illness. He knows that the chemistry in the brain is changed by the medications. He knows the efficacy of psychiatric drugs is often short-lived and that too many cause side effects that require more and more medications. He knows that the pharmaceutical industry has promoted the use of their products to unsuspecting vulnerable people like my daughter creating chronically dependent users. Very solemnly he agreed that it is a travesty what has happened to the mentally ill in this country.
Why didn’t he say something to me? Why hadn’t ANYONE said something to me before I found this out on my own?
My therapist equivocated saying that many people do find relief in a quick-acting pill. The alternative – psychoanalysis – is a long, drawn-out process, requiring patience and the support of family and friends. Few people would chose that route given an alternative that might make them feel good in a matter of weeks – however temporary that may be.
But, I asked, how about someone like my daughter who never really found relief from meds and was treated to hundreds of different combinations of antidepressants and antipsychotics, truckloads of neuroleptics and yet she continued to struggle and got worse along the way?
From Anatomy of an Epidemic -
As a society, we put our trust in the medical profession to develop the best possible clinical care for diseases and ailments of all types. We expect that the profession will be honest with us as it goes about this task. And yet, as we look for ways to stem the epidemic of disabling mental illness that has erupted in this country, we cannot trust psychiatry, as a profession, to fulfill that responsibility.
For the past twenty-five years, the psychiatric establishment has told us a false story. It told us that schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar illness are known to be brain diseases, even though … it can’t direct us to any scientific studies that document this claim. It told us that psychiatric medications fix chemical imbalances in the brain, even though decades of research failed to find this to be so. It told us that Prozac and the other second-generation psychotropics were much better and safer than the first-generation drugs, even though the clinical studies had shown no such link. Most important of all, the psychiatric establishment failed to tell us that the drugs worsen long-term outcomes. …
We need to become informed about the long-term outcomes …. and then we need to ask the National Institute of Mental Health, National Alliance on Mental Illness and the American Psychiatric Association, and all those who prescribe the medications to address the many questions raised (by Robert Whitaker’s research). In other words, we need to have an honest scientific discussion. We need to talk about what is truly known about the biology of mental disorders, about what the drugs actually do, and about how the drugs increase the risk that people will become chronically ill. If we could have that discussion, then change surely would follow. Our society would embrace and promote alternative forms of non-drug care. Physicians would prescribe the medications in a much more limited, cautious manner… In short, our societal delusions about “psychopharmacology” revolution could at last fade away, and good science could illuminate the path to a much better future.
From my book Collateral Damage -
I reviewed our bills from Austen Riggs and pulled out the statements from the pharmacy. This is the premier facility in the country for the treatment-resistant patient and they have been drugging the life out L. Pharmaceuticals may be the current protocol for treatment, the studied, well-documented and well-received modern approach, but they didn’t work for L. My guess is that one hundred years from now the sedation techniques and useless attempts to corral L’s untamed mind with locked doors and rules will be viewed to have been as barbaric and innocuous as attaching a leach to cure a fever. Psychiatry seems to have lost its way. Poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications, coupled with talk therapy that did not promote coping strategies, help with sorting out her reasoning skills or hone her ability to manage relationships had all failed L.
For a couple of months, it looked like they were tapering off the drug regime, clearing her system, but suddenly, there was a startling increase in medications being administered. More importantly, L’s anxiety continued through every drug recommended. Didn’t anybody notice?
I knew something was wrong, I just didn’t know about the fraud that was being perpetrated on my daughter and millions in our country just like her.
