In the NYRB Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School, reviews seven books on psychiatry and the use of psychotropic drugs. The two part article, The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? and The Illusions of Psychiatry, are currently available for free. Both are recommended reading.
I am especially concerned about children and teens taking psychoactive drugs. No, that does not mean that I mind when fifteen year old teens drink a beer or smoke a joint. But I am very suspicious when I am told by parents that their child has this or that disorder that gets fixed by taking some chemical mixture which has unknown effect-chains in the body and especially in the brain.
Being hyperactive and/or inattentive is part of being a child. It is normal. It can be ´cured just by increasing outdoor activities. Being partly depressive is practically the definition of a teen in puberty. These are not illnesses but important and necessary parts of growing up. Taking psychotropics daily, often with serious side effects, will not heal such illnesses but cause damage.
The first part of the article demonstrates that there is huge increase in the numbers of people who are diagnosed with some mental disorder and get prescribed one or more psychotropic drugs. It shows how this increase is not a real increase in mentally ill people, but an increase in the definitions of what is considered mentally ill. These definitions are made up and marketed by people with an interest to increase the number of patients and drug sales, doctors and the drug industry.
The way drugs get approved for this or that mental disorders is also troublesome. Notice also how the state is again willingly asleep at the wheel:
For obvious reasons, drug companies make very sure that their positive studies are published in medical journals and doctors know about them, while the negative ones often languish unseen within the FDA, which regards them as proprietary and therefore confidential. This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.
If a new drug is introduced for this or that illness, all studies about that drug should be publicly available. Today a new drug may have one industry paid study with positive results and nine negative ones. Only the positive one gets published and no one except the industry and the FDA knows about the others.
The incentives on the doctor's side favor drug prescription over other successful and less harm causing therapies:
Like most other psychiatrists, Carlat treats his patients only with drugs, not talk therapy, and he is candid about the advantages of doing so. If he sees three patients an hour for psychopharmacology, he calculates, he earns about $180 per hour from insurers. In contrast, he would be able to see only one patient an hour for talk therapy, for which insurers would pay him less than $100.
But interestingly it ain't just the industry and the doctors that have an incentive to increase the number of mentally ill.
As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disability is the only way to survive.
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Hospitals and state welfare agencies also have incentives to encourage uninsured families to apply for SSI payments, since hospitals will get paid and states will save money by shifting welfare costs to the federal government.
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In December 2006 a four-year-old child named Rebecca Riley died in a small town near Boston from a combination of Clonidine and Depakote, which she had been prescribed, along with Seroquel, to treat “ADHD” and “bipolar disorder”—diagnoses she received when she was two years old.
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The parents had obtained SSI benefits for the siblings and for themselves, and were applying for benefits for Rebecca when she died. The family’s total income from SSI was about $30,000 per year.
The state setting incentives in a way that practically makes people declare their children mentally ill and let them take psychotropic drugs with hospitals and psychiatrists supporting such behaviour – how sick is that?
As what would a psychopharmacists classify that mental disorder? What is the pill against it?