Antidepressant info

Some info and wisdom from my Withdrawal and Recovery group.

BENEFITS OF DISCONTINUING SSRIs:

1. Every day you are taking one of these drugs, more damage is
being done to your brain and body. There is no escaping this.
Psychotropic drugs alter brain chemistry and brain structure in ways
nature never would.

2. They are ALL damaging to the heart and those that manipulate
serotonin in particular, are damaging to your entire circulatory
system.

3. All of these drugs, perhaps with the exception of the
benzodiazepines, damage your entire hormonal system. Most people
think of hormones as bweing only estrogen and testosterone. That is
not correct. There are many hormones in the body including
serotonin and insulin. Antidepressants and antipsychotics alter how
your body metabolizes insulin which damages many other body
processes including certain organs.


5. All psychotropic drugs damage your nervous system. Your nervous
system is the centeral network in your body involved in all bodily
processes.


4. Scores of articles, websites, and books detail the dangers of
psychotropic drugs. The basic fact is that your life is shortened
and you will face illnesses, chronic ones, as a result of continuing
these drugs.

********

Very few people escape the ravages of these drugs; however, in many cases, people do not connect what they are experiencing with the drugs they took. Some no longer can lose weight as they used to. This is because the drugs disrupt proper insulin metabolism. How? Serotonin and insulin are intimately connected. When you alter serotonin, you alter insulin.

ADs are harmful to the cardiovascular system. Excess serotonin damages arteries. All SSRIs cause excess serotonin -- at least initially.

SSRIs leave you with fewer serotonin receptors than you had prior to taking the drug. All ADs do this to the receptors of whatever neurotransmitters they affect.

People end up more tired than ever. Eventually, some get fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. They don't associate it with the drugs.

All hormones are adversely affected.
People feel less emotionally. They are less empathic with others.
Psychotropic drugs turn people into carbohydrate addicts.

These are just a few of the things that psychotropic drugs do.

As for how this can be allowed to continue -- the bottom line is, follow the money. This is a multi-billion-dollar industry that is growing every day. Only the best industrial psychologists and Madison Avenue advertising firms work for the pharmaceutical industry. Also, consider the role the drug industry plays in the stock market. What would happen if they were really called to task and made to stop selling drugs that don't work or cause harm? Most likely, the entire economic underpinning of the US would collapse.

Final note -- it is not just psychotropic drugs that are dangerous and lacking in efficacy being foisted upon the public.

American Journal of Psychiatry:

Roy H. Perlis, Clifford S. Perlis, Yelena Wu, Cindy Hwang, Megan Joseph, and Andrew A. Nierenberg (2005) Industry Sponsorship and Financial Conflict of Interest in the Reporting of Clinical Trials in Psychiatry. Am J Psychiatry, 162: 1957 - 1960.


British Journal of Psychiatry:

Moncrieff, J. (2002) The antidepressant debate. British Journal of Psychiatry, 180(3): 193-194.

Andrews, G. (2001) Placebo response in depression: bane of research, boon to therapy. British Journal of Psychiatry, 178, 192-194.

Even, C., Siobud-Dorocant, E. & Dardennes, R. M. (2000) Critical approach to antidepressant trials. Blindness protection is necessary, feasible and measurable. British Journal of Psychiatry, 177, 47-51.


Public Library of Science – Medicine (Working Links):

Lacasse JR, Leo J (2005) Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature. PLoS Med 2(12): e392 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392

Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Healy D (2006) The Latest Mania: Selling Bipolar Disorder. PLoS Med 3(4): e185 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030185

Smith R (2005) Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies. PLoS Med 2(5): e138 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020138

Having only ever tried AD's once before many years ago & having such a horrid reaction to them that I decided that no matter how bad things got there was no way I was going back onto them, I felt as though I was a zombie and my whole body shook from the minute I took the first pill, I realised when my body stopped shaking that it was the pill which had caused it, I therefore took the decision to leave them alone, as people kept asking me "are you alright?", my reply was "I am not sure".

I think the best advice a friend ever gave me was to put the pills in the bin and go from there, this might not be to everyones I don't feel we have the right to tell others how to *fix*, their lives we can only lead by example as it were. :lol:

Some really interesting looking reading there, thanks Linda (and Joel).

I genuinely resent the 'pill for every ill' attitude that pervades western society, but equally I am amazed and proud of much of the research and development done, particularly to cure chronic and degenerative illnesses.

I have to take medication every day, for my physical health, and would not be without that support for the world, but would be off it in a flash if I could - I've tried more than once to no success.

I do think that lifestyle and society has a greater impact on health than many people are willing to accept.

Social inclusion is a biggie too - how many of us actually live in a real community? Family and friends all nearby, knowing the shop workers and everyone on your street? Without these networks, we are all far more prone to illness (physical or mental). I'm very happy to see so much time and effort being put into social inclusion work, but sad that we need government money to keep us socially involved.

A bit of a ramble I know, but I don't really have anywhere else to share this kind of thing.

Excerpt from "Psychopharmacology and Human Values" by Peter Breggin

http://www.breggin.com/psychopharmacologyand.pbreggin.2003.pdf

Psychopharmacology and psychiatry now dominate the mental health field. Even humanistic and existential therapists are likely to refer difficult or disturbed clients to physicians, especially psychiatrists, for possible medication. The prevailing professional tendency is to conceptualise the conflict between psychotherapy and drug treatment as a scientific one; but it is at root a conflict between two different views of human nature. We need to renew our faith in the psychiatric drug-free human being in both our personal and professional lives.

Throughout the mental health professions, and medicine in general, there is an increasing reliance on psychiatric drugs for a broadening array of human suffering from conflict between parents and children to anxiety and despair among adults. This professional reliance on drugs takes many forms, including (a) failure to recognise the existence of safer and more effectove psychtherapeutic approaches, (b) distrusting their own professional skills at critical moments in therapy, (c) overestimating the value of medication to relieve suffering, and, in particular, to prevent suicide, and (d) falsely communicating to patients that they cannot succeed in therapy without the addition of a medication.

I have criticised the growing trend to use medicalised diagnoses and treatment with drugs and electroshock and have proposed better human services based on empathy (Breggin, 1991, 1992, 1997a, 1997b, 1998, 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Breggin & Breggin, 1994, 1998; Breggin, Breggin, & Bemack, 2002; Breggin & Cohen, 1999; Breggin & Stern, 1996). My views have drawn on traditions established by psychosocially oriented psychologists and psychiatrists, (e.g. Adler, 1969; Allport, 1955; Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956; Fromm, 1956; Laing, 1967; Laing & Esterson, 1970; Rogers, 1961, 1995; Sullivan, 1953; Szasz, 1987). Many other contemporary voices have also been criticising the fundamental principles of biological psychiatry from scientific, humanistic psychology, and philosophical perspectives (Armstrong, 1993; Caplan, 1995; Cohen & Cohen, 1983; Colbert, 1996; Fisher & Greenberg, 1989, 1997; Jacobs, 1995; Modrow, 1992; Mosher & Burti, 1989; Romme & Escher, 1993; Ross & Pam, 1995).

Faith in "My Biochemical Imbalance"

When people consider starting or stopping psychiatric drugs, they often feel as if they are facing a void or stepping off a cliff. These patients and their doctors believe that they must rely on psychiatric drugs. That is, they don't believe there are safer and potentially more effective alternatives to drugs. If they don't take the drugs, what else can they do? If they stop relying on psychiatric drugs, what will they rely on? What will they do about their suffering without their psychiatric drugs? In today's society, people who seek help from doctors seldom realise that reliance on psychiatric drugs is, at root, based on faith rather than on scientific conclusions. In particular, they don't know how flimsy the data is for supporting the most commonly used psychiatric medications, such as the newer generation of antidepressants called SSRIs, such as fluvoxamine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil/Seroxat), sertraline (Zoloft), and citalopram (Celexa). (See Breggin, 2001a, 2001b; Breggin & Breggin, 1994; Fisher & Greenberg, 1989, 1997.)

In clinical practice, patients commonly present with one or another variation on the following scenario. Ms. Martin was 18 years old when she left an abusive, "dysfunctional" family and attempted to live alone and to work while putting herself through college. Her family actively opposed her efforts, and she eventually began to feel paralysed with anxiety and hopelessness. After returning home, the family doctor told her that she was suffering from "major depression" caused by a "biochemical imbalance." He placed her on an antidepressant that she continued to take for several years. She then suffered a brief "manic" episode that, in retrospect, was probably induced by the antidepressant.

The family doctor referred Ms. Martin to a psychiatrist who reemphasised to her that she had a "biochemical imbalance" caused by genetic and biological dysfunctions. He changed her diagnosis from major depression to bipolar disorder without informing her that the antidepressant probably caused her "mania." He prescribed another antidepressant and added lithium to "stabilise" her "mood swings." For the next 10 years, Ms. Martin's life involved a constant tinkering with antidepressants, often two at a time, and various dosing schedules of lithium and other drugs. She never returned to college and enjoyed only moderate success at work compared to her real abilities.

When Ms. Martin began to realise that she was becoming increasingly apathetic and experiencing memory loss, she sought help to assist her in coming off psychiatric drugs. In the initial discussions, it became apparent that Ms. Martin had been living for many years according to the simplistic faith of biopsychiatry: "I have a genetic and biological disease called bipolar disorder that requires treatment for the rest of my life. The drugs correct by biochemical imbalance."

The biopsychiatric faith had left Ms. Martin dependent on doctors for medication. The drugs had confined her within the physical constraints of drug-induced emotional numbness and apathy and ultimately impaired her cognitive function. She plodded along in drug-induced stagnation without ever experiencing personal fulfillment in her work or social life.

Although Ms. Martin's initial crisis developed during her teenage attempt to leave an abusive home, none of her doctors suggested to her that she might have psychologically based problems and that psychotherapy or counselling might be helpful. The biochemical bias of her doctors actively discouraged her from learning about and overcoming the original sources for her problems.

Over a period of several months, Ms. Martin was able to withdraw from psychiatric drugs. In the process, she developed a philosophy of life that empowered her to take charge of her thoughts and feelings and to take new steps toward the fulfillment of her psychological, social, and creative needs. She convinced her employer to pay for her college credits, and she began a marked escalation in career achievements. She was also more able to express her feelings and to develop more fulfilling personal relationships.

***********

In the humanistic, existential approach, human beings are seen as endowed with unique capacities, yearnings, and aspirations. They seek to overcome and transcend suffering through self-understanding, ethics, community, and enriched lives. In this model, people must take personal responsibility for their lives, including the quality of their mental condition and relationships with others, including children.

The corresponding psychotherapeutic model does not reject the existence of the body or the attempt to address complex mind-body issues. Its emphasis is more focused and even practical: First, the human suffering dealt with by psychiatrists and other mental health professionas is almost always psychological, existential and social in nature, rather than biological; and second, psychotherapeutic rather than biological interventions are safer and more effective for these problems. When patients do turn out to have a real physical problem contributing to their psychological suffering, such as a chronic head injury or thyroid disease, they need specific medical treatments and not psychiatric drugs.

There are many traditional ideas about human nature that are particularly relevant when trying to reject or to withdraw from psychiatric drugs.

-- Pain and suffering have meaning. Emotions are signals, not symptoms; they tell us about our physical and psychological condition. When we blunt our emotions, we blind ourselves to our inner feelings and needs and suppress our human nature.

-- Heroism is required to live a principled life in the face of the inevitable pain and suffering that all human beings endure.

-- There are no short cuts to making life less painful or to achieving peace of mind. Hard work and rational, consistent principles are required to achieve a state of contentment or satisfaction, and such a state always remains fragile.

-- Human beings thrive to the extent that they live by ideals and refuse to compromise them.

In recent centuries, philosophy and psychology have added to concepts of human nature, the self, or the soul. Following are some of these more contemporary humanistic or existential principles:

-- Individuals seek self-actualisation or self-fulfillment through the development and expression of their unique capacities and will suffer if this pursuit is inhibited or thwarted.

-- Empathy -- the capacity to understand and to care about the feelings and viewpoint of others -- is central to an ethical and fulfilling life. Empathy is also the basis of healing.

-- Successful people take personal repsonsibility for choosing the principles by which they conduct their lives.

-- Emotional and psychological suffering can come from many causes -- from early childhood trauma to unhappiness in marriage or work. It can also come from the failure to find a meaningful way of life. Triumph over psychological suffering requires self-understanding, responsibility, and commitment to sound principles of living.

Biopsychiatric Mechanical Model of Human Life

When people choose to become patients of a psychiatrist who prescibes drugs, they are doing a great deal more than merely "seeing the doctor." They are subjecting themselves to a very specific and limited model of thinking about human suffering and failure. The widespread adoption of this mechanistic model is relatively new in the hisotry of humankind. It demands that we think of ourselves as broken machines or flawed mechanical devices. It requires blind faith in doctors and scientists, combined with a materialistic faith in molecular causes and manipulations.

In the biopsychiatric model, we are mechanical devices similar to computers or other machines. Our suffering is caused by genetic and biological factors beyond our control. When we cannot seem to find a solution on our own, we place our fate in the hands of technicians who know how to tinker with our machinery.

In this mechanical model, we have very little personal responsibility for our condition. We are spared the painful search for the personal and psychological causes of our suffering in our lives as children and adults. We are relieved of the necessity of finding more valid and meaningful principles of living. We do not have to face our conflicts with our husbands or wives, fathers or mothers, children, friends, coworkers, or bosses. We do not have to seek more meaningful work and satisfying relationships. Heroism and determination in the face of our suffering becomes irrelevant. We are only responsible for taking our medications as directed. For these reasons, the psychotherapeutic model cannot be successfully blended with the biological model. The biological model undermines the core of the humanistic, existential or psychotherapeutic approach in therapy.

Taking psychiatric drugs is not like taking insulin for diabetes. In psychiatry, the "target organ" is the brain, and the brain is the seat of our thinking, feeling selves. This is very different from taking drugs to modify the functioning of our hearts or livers. Consider, for example, the difference between a heart transplant and a brain transplant. If you were to exchange your old brain for a new one, you would become another person -- the person who donated the brain. You, as a distinct person, would die with the death of your old brain.

But you can exchange your heart for a new one without losing your identity and without becoming the donor. To pursue the parallel, when you take a psychiatric drug, you change yourself as a person; but when you take a cardiac drug, little about you as a person is changed.

Tragically, modern, well-informed people too often put their faith in psychiatry and its drugs. This has become the equivalent of putting one's faith in the pharmaceutical industry. Drug promotion panders to the most superficial values in the culture: the hope of short cuts around the need for personal responsibility and personal growth. In doing so, the drug companies and biological psychiatry do more harm than good. Mental health professionals need to reclaim their professional knowledge and skills. They should srtive to help their clients and patients to reclaim their faith in fundamental values, including personal responsibility, empathy and love, and principled living.

http://thestreetspirit.org/August2005/interview.htm

Psychiatric Drugs: An Assault on the Human Condition
Interview by Terry Messman

Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring
Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.

Investigative reporter Robert Whitaker, author of the groundbreaking
book Mad In America, is now pursuing a fascinating line of research
into how the mammoth psychiatric drug industry is endangering the
American public by covering up the untold cases of suffering, anguish
and disease caused by the most widely prescribed antidepressants and
antipsychotic medications.

Whitaker exposes the massive lies and cover-ups that have corrupted
the Food and Drug Administration's drug review process, and co-opted
research trials in order to spin the results of drug tests and
conceal the serious hazards and even deadly side-effects of brand-
name drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Zyprexa.

The story becomes even more frightening when we look at the
aggressive tactics these giant drug companies have used to silence
prominent critics by defaming them in the press, and by using their
money and power to have widely respected scientists and eminent
medical researchers fired for daring to point out the hazards and
risks of suicide and premature death caused by these drugs.

Whitaker starts by debunking the effectiveness of these massively
hyped wonder drugs -- antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil,
and the new atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa. His research
shows how they often are barely more effective than placebos in
treating mental disorder and depression, despite the glowing
adulation they have received in the mainstream media.

But he goes on to make the startling claim that these new psychiatric
drugs have directly contributed to an alarming new epidemic of drug-
induced mental illness. The very drugs prescribed by physicians to
stabilize mental disorders in fact are inducing pathological changes
in brain chemistry and triggering suicide, manic and psychotic
episodes, convulsions, violence, diabetes, pancreatic failure,
metabolic diseases, and premature death.

Whitaker originally was a highly regarded science reporter for the
Boston Globe. When he began to research a series on psychiatric
issues for the Globe, he was still a believer in the story of
progress that psychiatry has been telling the public for decades.

He said, "I absolutely believed the common wisdom that these
antipsychotic drugs actually had improved things and that they had
totally revolutionized how we treated schizophrenia. People used to
be locked away forever, and now maybe things weren't great, but they
were a lot better. It was a story of progress."

That story of progress was fraudulent, as Whitaker soon found out
when he gained new insight from his research into torturous
psychiatric practices such as electroshock, lobotomy, insulin coma,
and neuroleptic drugs. Psychiatrists told the public that these
techniques "cured" psychosis or balanced the chemistry of the brain.

But, in reality, the common thread in all these different treatments
was the attempt to suppress "mental illness" by deliberately damaging
the higher functions of the brain. The stunning truth is that, behind
closed doors, the psychiatric establishment itself labeled these
treatments as "brain-damaging therapeutics."

The first generation of antipsychotic drugs created a drug-induced
brain pathology by blocking the neurotransmitter dopamine and
essentially shutting down many higher brain functions. In fact, when
antipsychotics such as Thorazine and Haldol were first introduced,
psychiatrists themselves said that these neuroleptic drugs were
virtually indistinguishable from a "chemical lobotomy."

In recent years, the media have heralded the arrival of so-called
designer drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zyprexa that are supposed to be
superior and have fewer side effects than the old tricyclic
antidepressants and the first antipsychotics. Millions of Americans
have believed this story and have enriched drug companies like Eli
Lilly by spending billions of dollars annually to purchase these new
medications.

Whitaker's research into the tragic cases of disease, suffering and
early deaths caused by these drugs shows that millions of consumers
have been misled by a massive campaign of lies, distortions, and
bought-and-paid-for drug trials. Eminent medical researchers who have
tried to warn us of the perils of these drugs have been silenced,
intimidated and defamed. In the process, the Food and Drug
Administration has become the lapdog of the giant pharmaceutical
industry, not its watchdog.

Street Spirit interviewed Robert Whitaker about this new "epidemic"
of mental disorders, and how the giant drug companies have profited
from selling drugs that make us sicker.

Street Spirit: Your new line of research indicates that there has
been an enormous rise in the incidence of mental illness in the
United States, despite the seeming advances in a new generation of
psychiatric drugs. Why do you refer to this increase as an epidemic?

Robert Whitaker: Even people like the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey
wrote a book recently in which he said it looks like we're having an
epidemic of mental illness. When the National Institute of Mental
Health publishes its figures on the incidence of mental illness, you
see these rising numbers of mentally ill people. Some recent reports
even say that 20 percent of Americans now are mentally ill.

So what I wanted to do was two-fold. I wanted to look into exactly
how dramatic is this increase in mental illness, and particularly
severe mental illness. Part of this rise in the number of people said
to be mentally ill is just definitional. We draw a big wide boundary
today and we throw all sorts of people into that category of mentally
ill. So children who are not sitting neatly enough in their school
rooms are said to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD), and we created a new disorder called social anxiety disorder.

SS: So what used to be called simply shyness or anxiety in relating
to people is now labeled a mental disorder and you supposedly need an
antidepressant like Paxil for social anxiety disorder.
RW: Exactly. And you need a stimulant like Ritalin for ADHD.

SS: This increases psychiatry's clients, but doesn't it also increase
the number of people that giant pharmaceutical companies can sell
their psychiatric drugs to?
RW: Absolutely. So part of what we're seeing is nothing more than the
creation of a larger market for drugs. If you think about it, as long
as we draw as big a circle as possible, and expand the boundaries of
mental illness, psychiatry can have more clients and sell more drugs.
So there's a built-in economic incentive to define mental illness in
as broad terms as possible, and to find ordinary, distressing
emotions or behaviors that some people may not like and label them as
mental illness.

SS: Your research also shows that there is a real increase in people
who have a severe mental disorder. Now, this seems counterintuitive,
but is it true that you believe much of this increase is caused by
the overuse of some of the new generations of psychiatric drugs?
RW: Yes, exactly. I looked at the number of the so-called severely
disabled mentally ill -- people who aren't working or who are somehow
dysfunctional because of mental illness. So I wanted to chart through
history the percentage of the population who are considered the
disabled mentally ill.

Now, by 1903, we see that roughly 1 out of every 500 people in the
United States is hospitalized for mental illness. By 1955, at the
start of the modern era of psychiatric drugs, roughly one out of
every 300 people was disabled by mental illness. Now, let's go to
1987, the end of the first generation of antipsychotic drugs; and
from 1987 forward we get the modern psychiatric drugs. From 1955 to
1987, during this first era of psychiatric drugs -- the antipsychotic
drugs Thorazine and Haldol and the tricyclic antidepressants (such as
Elavil and Anafranil) -- we saw the number of disabled mentally ill
increase four-fold, to the point where roughly one out of every 75
persons are deemed disabled mentally ill.

Now, there was a shift in how we cared for the disabled mentally ill
between 1955 and 1987. In 1955, we were hospitalizing them. Then, by
1987, we had gone through social change, and we were now placing
people in shelters, nursing homes, and some sort of community care,
and gave them either SSI or SSDI payments for mental disability. In
1987, we started getting these supposedly better, second-generation
psychiatric drugs like Prozac and the other selective serotonin re-
uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. Shortly after that, we get
the new, atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa (olanzapine),
Clozaril and Risperdal.

What's happened since 1987? Well, the disability rate has continued
to increase until it's now one in every 50 Americans. Think about
that: One in every 50 Americans disabled by mental illness today. And
it's still increasing. The number of mentally disabled people in the
United States has been increasing at the rate of 150,000 people per
year since 1987. That's an increase every day over the last 17 years
of 410 people per day newly disabled by mental illness.

SS: So that leads to the obvious question. If psychiatry has
introduced these so-called wonder drugs like Prozac and Zoloft and
Zyprexa, why is the incidence of mental illness going up dramatically?
RW: That's exactly it. This is a scientific question. We have a form
of care where we're using these drugs in an ever more expansive
manner, and supposedly we have better drugs and they're the
cornerstone of our care, so we should see decreasing disability
rates. That's what your expectation would be.

Instead, from 1987 until the present, we saw an increase in the
number of mentally disabled people from 3.3 million people to 5.7
million people in the United States. In that time, our spending on
psychiatric drugs increased to an amazing degree. Combined spending
on antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants jumped from around $500
million in 1986 to nearly $20 billion in 2004. So we raise the
question: Is the use of these drugs somehow actually fueling this
increase in the number of the disabled mentally ill?

When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of
outcomes with all these drugs -- you see it with the antipsychotics,
the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like
Ritalin used to treat ADHD. All these drugs may curb a target symptom
slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of
time, say six weeks. An antidepressant may ameliorate the symptoms of
depression better than a placebo over the short term.

What you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a
worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety
over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients. So even on
the target symptoms, there's greater chronicity and greater severity
of symptoms. And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients
where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the
drug itself.

SS: New psychiatric symptoms created by the very drugs people are
told will help them recover?
RW: Absolutely. The most obvious case is with the antidepressants. A
certain percentage of people placed on the SSRIs because they have
some form of depression will suffer either a manic or psychotic
attack -- drug-induced. This is well recognized. So now, instead of
just dealing with depression, they're dealing with mania or psychotic
symptoms. And once they have a drug-induced manic episode, what
happens? They go to an emergency room, and at that point they're
newly diagnosed. They're now said to be bipolar and they're given an
antipsychotic to go along with the antidepressant; and, at that
point, they're moving down the path to chronic disability.

SS: Modern psychiatry claims that these psychiatric drugs correct
pathological brain chemistry. Is there any evidence to back up their
claim that abnormal brain chemistry is the culprit in schizophrenia
and depression?
RW: This is the key thing everyone needs to understand. It really is
the answer that unlocks this mystery of why the drugs would have this
long-term problematic effect. Start with schizophrenia. They
hypothesize that these drugs work by correcting an imbalance of the
neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.

The theory was that people with schizophrenia had overactive dopamine
systems; and these drugs, by blocking dopamine in the brain, fixed
that chemical imbalance. Therefore, you get the metaphor that they're
like insulin is for diabetes; they're fixing an abnormality. With the
antidepressants, the theory was that people with depression had too
low levels of serotonin; the drugs upped the levels of serotonin in
the brain and therefore they're balancing the brain chemistry.

First of all, those theories never arose from investigations into
what was actually happening to people. Rather, they would find out
that antipsychotics blocked dopamine and so they theorized that
people had overactive dopamine systems. Same with the
antidepressants. They found that antidepressants upped the levels of
serotonin; therefore, they theorized that people with depression must
have low levels of serotonin.

But here is the thing that one wishes all of America would know and
wishes psychiatry would come clean on: They've never been able to
find that people with schizophrenia have overactive dopamine systems.
They've never been able to find that people with depression have
underactive serotonin systems. They've never found consistently that
any of these disorders are associated with any chemical imbalance in
the brain. The story that people with mental disorders have known
chemical imbalances -- that's a lie. We don't know that at all. It's
just something that they say to help sell the drugs and help sell the
biological model of mental disorders.

But the kicker is this. We do know, in fact, that these drugs perturb
how these chemical messengers work in the brain. The real paradigm
is: People diagnosed with mental disorders have no known problem with
their neurotransmitter systems; and these drugs perturb the normal
function of neurotransmitters.

SS: So rather than fixing a chemical imbalance, these widely
prescribed drugs distort the brain chemistry and make it pathological.
RW: Absolutely. Stephen Hyman, a well-known neuroscientist and the
former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote a
paper in 1996 that looked at how psychiatric drugs affect the brain.
He wrote that all these drugs create perturbations in
neurotransmitter functions. And he notes that the brain, in response
to this drug from the outside, alters its normal functions and goes
through a series of compensatory adaptations.

In other words, it tries to adapt to the fact that an antipsychotic
drug is blocking normal dopamine functions. Or in the case of
antidepressants, it tries to compensate for the fact that you're
blocking a normal reuptake of serotonin. The way it does this is to
adapt in the opposite way. So, if you're blocking dopamine in the
brain, the brain tries to put out more dopamine and it actually
increases the number of dopamine receptors. So a person placed on
antipsychotic drugs will end up with an abnormally high number of
dopamine receptors in the brain.

If you give someone an antidepressant, and that tries to keep
serotonin levels too high in the brain, it does exactly the opposite.
It stops producing as much serotonin as it normally does and it
reduces the number of serotonin receptors in the brain. So someone
who is on an antidepressant, after a time ends up with an abnormally
low level of serotonin receptors in the brain. And here's what Hyman
concluded about this: After these changes happened, the patient's
brain is functioning in a way that is "qualitatively as well as
quantitatively different from the normal state." So what Stephen
Hyman, former head of the NIMH, has done is present a paradigm for
how these drugs affect the brain that shows that they're inducing a
pathological state.

SS: So the paradox is there's no evidence for modern psychiatry's
claim that there is any pathological biochemical imbalance in the
brain that causes mental illness, but if you treat people with these
new wonder drugs, that is what creates a pathological imbalance?
RW: Yes, these drugs disrupt normal brain chemistry. That's the real
paradox here. And the real tragedy is, that even as we peddle these
drugs as chemical balancers, chemical fixers, in truth we're doing
precisely the opposite. We're taking a brain that has no known
abnormal brain chemistry, and by placing people on the drugs, we're
perturbing that normal chemistry. Here's how Barry Jacobs, a
Princeton neuroscientist, describes what happens to a person given an
SSRI antidepressant. "These drugs," he said, "alter the level of
synaptic transmission beyond the physiologic range achieved under
normal environmental biological conditions. Thus, any behavioral or
physiologic change produced under these conditions might more
appropriately be considered pathologic rather than reflective of the
normal biological role of serotonin."

SS: One of the SSRI antidepressants that's widely believed to be a
wonder drug is Prozac. Yet your research found that the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) received more adverse reports about Prozac than
any other drug. What sort of ill effects were people reporting?
RW: First of all, with Prozac and the SSRIs that followed, their
level of efficacy was always of a very minor sort. In all the
clinical trials of the antidepressants, roughly 41 percent of the
patients got better in the short term versus 31 percent of the
patients on placebo. Now just one other caveat on that. If you use an
active placebo in these trials -- an active placebo causes a
physiologic change with no benefit, like a dry mouth -- any
difference in outcome between the antidepressant and placebo
virtually disappears.

SS: Weren't the early drug tests of Prozac so unpromising that they
had to manipulate test results to get FDA approval at all?
RW: What happened with Prozac is a fascinating story. Right from the
beginning, they noticed only very marginal efficacy over placebo; and
they noticed that they had some problems with suicide. There were
increased suicidal responses compared to placebo. In other words, the
drugs was agitating people and making people suicidal who hadn't been
suicidal before. They were getting manic responses in people who
hadn't been manic before. They were getting psychotic episodes in
people who hadn't been psychotic before. So you were seeing these
very problematic side effects even at the same time that you were
seeing very modest efficacy, if any, over placebo in ameliorating
depression.

Basically, what Eli Lilly (Prozac's manufacturer) had to do was cover
up the psychosis, cover up the mania; and, in that manner, it was
able to get these drugs approved. One FDA reviewer even warned that
Prozac appeared to be a dangerous drug, but it was approved anyway.
We're seemingly finding all this out only now: "Oh, Prozac can cause
suicidal impulses and all these SSRIs may increase the risk of
suicide." The point is, that wasn't anything new. That data was there
from the very first trial. You had people in Germany saying, "I think
this is a dangerous drug."

SS: Even back in the late 1980s, they already knew?
RW: Before the late 1980s -- in the early '80s, before Prozac gets
approved. Basically what Eli Lilly had to do was cover up that risk
of mania and psychosis, cover up that some people were becoming
suicidal because they were getting this nervous agitation from
Prozac. That's the only way it got approved.

There were various ways they did the cover-up. One was just to simply
remove reports of psychosis from some of the data. They also went
back and recoded some of the trial results. Let's say someone had a
manic episode or a psychotic episode; instead of putting that down,
they would just put down a return of depression, and that sort of
thing. So there was a basic need to hide these risks right from the
beginning, and that's what was done.

So Prozac gets approved in 1987, and it's launched in this amazing PR
campaign. The pill itself is featured on the cover of several
magazines! It's like the Pill of the Year . And it's said to
be so much safer: a wonder drug. We have doctors saying, "Oh, the
real problem with this drug is that we can now create whatever
personality we want. We're just so skilled with these drugs that if
you want to be happy all the time, take your pill!"


That was complete nonsense. The drugs were barely better than placebo
at alleviating depressive symptoms over the short term. You had all
these problems; yet we were touting these drugs, saying, "Oh, the
powers of psychiatry are such that we can give you the mind you want -
- a designer personality!" It was absolutely obscene. Meanwhile,
which drug, after being launched, quickly became the most complained
about drug in America? Prozac!

SS: What were the level of complaints when Prozac hit the market?
RW: In this county, we have Medwatch, a reporting system in which we
report adverse events about psychiatric drugs to the FDA. By the way,
the FDA tries to keep these adverse reports from the public. So,
instead of the FDA making these easily available to the public. so
you can know about the dangers of the drugs, it's very hard to get
these reports.

Within one decade, there were 39,000 adverse reports about Prozac
that were sent to Medwatch. The number of adverse events sent to
Medwatch is thought to represent only one percent of the actual
number of such events. So, if we get 39,000 adverse event reports
about Prozac, the number of people who have actually suffered such
problems is estimated to be 100 times as many, or roughly four
million people. This makes Prozac the most complained about drug in
America, by far. There were more adverse event reports received about
Prozac in its first two years on the market than had been reported on
the leading tricyclic antidepressant in 20 years.

Remember, Prozac is pitched to the American public as this
wonderfully safe drug, and yet what are people complaining about?
Mania, psychotic depression, nervousness, anxiety, agitation,
hostility, hallucinations, memory loss, tremors, impotence,
convulsions, insomnia, nausea, suicidal impulses. It's a wide range
of serious symptoms.

And here's the kicker. It wasn't just Prozac. Once we got the other
SSRIs on the market, like Zoloft and Paxil, by 1994, four SSRI
antidepressants were among the top 20 most complained about drugs on
the FDA's Medwatch list. In other words, every one of these drugs
brought to market started triggering this range of adverse events.
And these were not minor things. When you talk about mania,
hallucinations, psychotic depression, these are serious adverse
events.


Prozac was pitched to the American public as a wonder drug. It was
featured on the covers of magazines as so safe, and as a sign of our
wonderful ability to effect the brain just as we want it. In truth,
the reports were showing it could trigger a lot of dangerous events,
including suicide and psychosis.

The FDA was being warned about this. They were getting a flood of
adverse event reports, and the public was never told about this for
the longest period of time. It took a decade for the FDA to begin to
acknowledge the increased suicides and the violence it can trigger in
some people. It just shows how the FDA betrayed the American people.
This is a classic example. They betrayed their responsibility to act
as a watchdog for the American people. Instead they acted as an
agency that covered up harm and risk with these drugs.

SS: In light of the FDA's failure to warn us about Prozac, what about
their recent negligence on the issue of the risk of suicide in
children given antidepressants like Paxil? Weren't England's mental
health officials far better than their American counterparts in the
FDA in warning about the dangers of suicidal attempts when
antidepressants are given to youth?
RW: Yes. The children's story is unbelievably tragic. It's also a
really sordid story. Let's go back a little to see what happened to
children and antidepressants. Prozac comes to market in 1987. By the
early 1990s, the pharmaceutical companies making these drugs are
saying, "How do we expand the market for antidepressants?" Because
that's what drug companies do -- they want to get to an ever-larger
number of people. They saw they had an untapped market in kids. So
let's start peddling the drugs to kids. And they were successful.
Since 1990, the use of antidepressants in kids went up something like
seven-fold. They began prescribing them willy-nilly.

Now, whenever they did pediatric trials of antidepressants, they
found that the drugs were no more effective on the target symptom of
depression than placebo. This happened again and again in the
pediatric drug trials of antidepressants. So, what that tells you is
there is no real therapeutic rationale for the drugs because in this
population of kids, the drugs don't even curb the target symptoms
over the short term any better than placebo; and yet they were
causing all sorts of adverse events.

For example, in one trial, 75 percent of youth treated with
antidepressants suffered an adverse event of some kind. In one study
by the University of Pittsburgh, 23 percent of children treated with
an SSRI developed mania or manic-like symptoms; an additional 19
percent developed drug-induced hostility. The clinical results were
telling you that you didn't get any benefit on depression; and you
could cause all sorts of real problems in kids -- mania, hostility,
psychosis, and you may even stir suicide. In other words, don't use
these drugs, right? It was absolutely covered up.

SS: How was it covered up?
RW: We had psychiatrists -- some of those obviously getting money
from the drug companies -- saying the kids are under-treated and
they're at risk of suicide and how could we possibly treat kids
without these pills and what a tragedy it would be if we couldn't use
these antidepressants.

Finally, a prominent researcher in England, David Healy, started
doing his own research on the ability of these drugs to stir suicide.
He also managed to get access to some of the trial results and he
blew the whistle. He first blew the whistle in England and he
presented this data to the review authorities there. And they saw
that it looks like these drugs are increasing the risk of suicide and
there are really no signs of benefits on the target symptoms of
depression. So they began to move there to warn doctors not to
prescribe these drugs to youth.

What happens in the United States? Well, it's only after there's a
lot of pressure put on the FDA that they even hold a hearing. The FDA
sort of downplays the risk of these drugs. They're slow to even put
black box warnings on them. Why? Aren't kids lives worth protecting?
If we know that we have a scientifically shown risk that these drugs
increase suicide, shouldn't you at least warn about it? But the FDA
was even digging in its heels about putting that black box warning on
the drugs.

SS: If Prozac is the nation's most complained about drug, if Paxil is
shown to be a suicide risk for youth, how do these antidepressants
continue to have a reputation as near-magic cures for depression? And
why did the FDA failed to warn us about Paxil and Prozac for such a
long time?
RW: There's a couple reasons for that. The FDA's funding changed in
the 1990s. An act was passed in which a lot of the FDA's funding came
from the drug industry: the PDUFA Act, or Prescription Drug User Fee
Act. Basically, when drug companies applied for FDA approval they had
to pay a fee. Those fees became what is funding a large portion of
the FDA's review of drug applications.

So all of a sudden, the funding is coming from the drug industry;
it's no longer coming from the people. As that act comes up for
renewal, basically the drug lobbyists are telling the FDA that their
job is no longer to be critically analyzing drugs, but to approve
drugs quickly. And that was part of Newt Gingrich's thing: Your job
is to get these drugs to market. Start partnering with the drug
industry and facilitating drug development. We lost this idea that
the FDA had a watchdog role.

Also, in a human way, a lot of people who work for the FDA leave
there and end up going to work for the drug companies. The old joke
is that the FDA is sort of like a showcase for a future job in the
drug industry. You go there, you work awhile, then you go off into
the drug industry. Well, if that's the progression that people make,
in essence they're making good old boy network connections, so
they're not going to be so harsh on the drug companies. So, that's
what really happened in the 1990s. The FDA was given new marching
orders. The orders were: "Facilitate getting drugs to market. Don't
be too critical. And, in fact, if you want to keep your funding,
which was coming now from the drug industry, make sure you take these
lessons to heart."

SS: So the giant pharmaceutical companies have a vast amount of power
to cook the results of drug tests and make researchers and even the
FDA itself bow to their will?
RW: The FDA, in essence, was kneecapped in the early 1990s, and we
really saw it with the psychiatric drugs. The FDA became a lapdog for
the pharmaceutical industry, not a watchdog.
It's only now that this has become common knowledge. We have Marcia
Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine,
write a book in which she says that the FDA became a lapdog. It's
basically now well recognized that you had this decline and fall. As
the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, the most
prestigious medical journal we have, Marcia Angell is someone who was
at the very heart of American medicine, and she concluded that the
FDA let down the American people. And she lost her job at the New
England Journal of Medicine for starting to criticize pharmaceutical
companies.

She was the editor of the journal in the late 1990s and there was a
corresponding doctor named Thomas Bodenheimer who decided to write an
article about how you couldn't even trust what was published in the
medical journals anymore because of all the spinning of results.
So they did an investigation about how the pharmaceutical companies
are funding all the research and spinning the trial results, so you
can no longer really trust what you read in scientific journals. They
pointed out that when they tried to get an expert to review the
scientific literature related to antidepressants, they basically
couldn't find someone who hadn't taken money from the drug companies.

Now, the New England Journal of Medicine is published by the
Massachusetts Medical Society which publishes a lot of other
journals, and they get a lot of pharmaceutical advertising. So what
happens after that article appears by Thomas Bodenheimer and an
accompanying editorial by Marcia Angell about the sorry state of
American medicine because of this? They both lose their jobs! She's
gone and so is Thomas Bodenheimer. Think about this. We have the
leading medical journal firing people, letting them go, because they
dared to criticize the dishonest science and the dishonest process
that was poisoning the scientific literature.

So we have the FDA that's acting as lapdogs. You can't trust the
scientific literature. All this shows how the American public was
betrayed and didn't know about all the problems with these drugs and
why it was kept from them. It has to do with money, prestige and old
boy networks.

SS: It also has to do with the silencing of critics. Eli Lilly uses
the media to trumpet Prozac's benefits and gives perks to doctors to
attend conferences to hear about its benefits, and buys off
researchers. But don't they also use their power and money to silence
their critics?
RW: An example is Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a psychiatrist who also
works for Harvard University Health Services, and who wrote a book
called Prozac Backlash to warn about the dangers of Prozac. He's
finding that the drugs are being overused and cause severe side
effects. He even raises questions about long-term memory problems
with the drugs and cognitive dysfunction. Well, Eli Lilly then
mounted a public relations campaign to try to discredit him. They
sent out notices to the media questioning his affiliation with
Harvard Medical School, etc. It was all about silencing the critics.

If you sing the tune that the drug companies want, at the very top
levels, you get paid a lot of money to fly around and give
presentations about the wonders of the drugs. And those who come, and
don't ask any embarrassing questions, get the lobster dinners and
maybe they get a little honorarium for attending this educational
meeting. So if you want to be part of this gravy train, you can. You
sing the wonders of the drug, and you don't talk about their nasty
side effects, and you can get a nice payment as one of their guest
speakers, as one of their experts.

But if you're one of the ones saying, "What about the mania, what
about the psychosis?" -- they do silence you. Look at what happened
to David Healy. Healy is even the best example. David Healy has this
sterling reputation in England. He's written several books on the
history of psychopharmacology. He's like the former Secretary of the
Psychopharmacology Association over there. He gets offered a job at
the University of Toronto to head up their psychiatry department. So
while he's waiting to assume that position at the University of
Toronto, he goes to Toronto and delivers a talk on the elevated risk
of suicide with Prozac and some of the other SSRIs. By the time he's
back home, the job offer has been rescinded.

Now does Eli Lilly donate some money to the University of Toronto?
Absolutely. So, to answer your question, yes, Eli Lilly silences
dissenters as well.

SS: What is the story behind the secret settlement between Eli Lilly
and the survivors who sued the company after Joseph Wesbecker shot 20
coworkers after being put on Prozac?
RW: During this trial in which Eli Lilly was being sued, the judge
was going to allow some very damaging evidence showing wrongdoing by
Eli Lilly in a previous instance. The judge said, "Go ahead and
introduce this at the trial." But next thing you know, they don't
introduce this; and in fact, all of a sudden, the plaintiffs no
longer are presenting very damaging evidence to make their case. So
the judge wonders why they are not presenting their best case
anymore. He smells a rat. He suspects Eli Lilly has settled with the
plaintiffs secretly and the deal is that, as part of this settlement,
the plaintiffs will go ahead with a sham trial so that Eli Lilly will
win the trial. Then Eli Lilly can claim, "See our drug doesn't cause
people to become violent."

And, indeed, that's what happened. Eli Lilly felt it was going to
lose this trial. They went to the plaintiffs and said they would give
them a lot of money. They agreed to go ahead and settle the case, but
had the plaintiffs go ahead with the trial. That way Eli Lilly can
publicly claim that they won the trial and Prozac doesn't cause harm.

SS: How did this even come out into the light of day?
RW: We would never have known about this except for two things. One,
believe it or not, the judge, in essence, appealed the decision in
his own court. He said, "I smell a rat." And through that, he found
out that there was this secret settlement and that it was a sham
proceeding that continued on. He said it was one of the worst
violations of the integrity of the legal process that he'd ever seen.
And second, an English journalist named John Cornwell wrote a book
called Power to Harm: Mind, Medicine, and Murder on Trial. He wrote
about this case, and yet in the United States, we got almost no news
about this secret settlement and this whole perversion of the legal
process. It was an English journalist who was exposing this story.

My point here is this: They silence people like Marcia Angell. They
pervert the scientific process. They pervert the legal process. They
pervert the FDA drug review process. It's everywhere! And that's how
we as a society end up believing in these psychiatric drugs. You
asked the question a while back, "Why do we still believe in Prozac?"
One of the reasons is that the story about Prozac is, in effect,
maintained. It's publicly maintained because we do all this silencing
along all these lines.

The other thing to remember is that some people on Prozac do feel
better. That's true. That shows up, just in the same way that some
people on placebos feel better. And those are the stories that get
repeated: "Oh, I took Prozac and I'm feeling better." It's that
select group that does better that becomes the story that is told out
there, and the story that the public hears. So that's why we
continued to believe in the story of these wonder drugs that are very
safe in spite of all this messy stuff that gets covered up.

SS: Let's now move from the antidepressants like Prozac to consider
another new group of supposed wonder drugs -- the new antipsychotic
drugs. You write that long-term use of antipsychotic drugs -- both
the original neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine and Haldol and the
newer atypicals like Zyprexa and Risperdal -- cause pathological
changes in the brain that can lead to a worsening of the symptoms of
mental illness. What changes in brain chemistry result from the
antipsychotics, and how can that lead to the most frightening
prospect you describe -- chronic mental illness that is locked in by
these drugs?
RW: This is a line of research that goes across 40 years. This
problem of chronic illness shows up time and time again in the
research literature. This biological mechanism is somewhat well
understood now. The antipsychotics profoundly block dopamine
receptors. They block 70-90 percent of the dopamine receptors in the
brain. In return, the brain sprouts about 50 percent extra dopamine
receptors. It tries to become extra sensitive.

So in essence you've created an imbalance in the dopamine system in
the brain. It's almost like, on one hand, you've got the accelerator
down -- that's the extra dopamine receptors. And the drug is the
brake trying to block this. But if you release that brake, if you
abruptly go off the drugs, you now do have a dopamine system that's
overactive. You have too many dopamine receptors. And what happens?
People that go abruptly off of the drug, do tend to have severe
relapses.

SS: So people that have been treated with these antipsychotic drugs
have a far greater tendency to relapse, and have new episodes of
mental illness, as opposed to people who have had other kinds of non-
drug therapies?
RW: Absolutely, and that was understood by 1979, that you were
actually increasing the underlying biological vulnerability to the
psychosis. And by the way, we sort of understood that if you muck
with the dopamine system, that you could cause some symptoms of
psychosis with amphetamines. So if you give someone amphetamines
enough, they're at increased risk of psychosis. This is well known.
And what do amphetamines do? They release dopamine. So there is a
biological reason why, if you're mucking up the dopamine system,
you're increasing the risk of psychosis. That's in essence what these
antipsychotic drugs do, they muck up the dopamine system.

Here's just one real powerful study on this: Researchers with the
University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s took people newly diagnosed
with schizophrenia, and they started taking MRI pictures of the
brains of these people. So we get a picture of their brains at the
moment of diagnosis, and then we prepare pictures over the next 18
months to see how those brains change. Now during this 18 months,
they are being prescribed antipsychotic medications, and what did the
researchers report? They reported that, over this 18-month period,
the drugs caused an enlargement of the basal ganglia, an area of the
brain that uses dopamine. In other words, it creates a visible change
in morphology, a change in the size of an area of the brain, and
that's abnormal. That's number one. So we have an antipsychotic drug
causing an abnormality in the brain.

Now here's the kicker. They found that as that enlargement occurred,
it was associated with a worsening of the psychotic symptoms, a
worsening of negative symptoms. So here you actually have, with
modern technology, a very powerful study. By imaging the brain, we
see how an outside agent comes in, disrupts normal chemistry, causes
an abnormal enlargement of the basal ganglia, and that enlargement
causes a worsening of the very symptoms it's supposed to treat. Now
that's actually, in essence, a story of a disease process -- an
outside agent causes abnormality, causes symptoms...

SS: But in this case, the outside agent that triggers the disease
process is the supposed cure for the disease! The psychiatric drug is
the disease-causing agent.
RW: That's exactly right. It's a stunning, damning finding. It's the
sort of finding you would say, "Oh Christ, we should be doing
something different." Do you know what those researchers got new
grants for, after they reported that?

SS: No, what? You'd guess they got funding to carry out these same
studies on other classes of psychiatric drugs.
RW: They got a grant to develop an implant, a brain implant, that
would deliver drugs like Haldol on a continual basis! A grant to
develop a drug delivery implant so you could implant this in the
brains of people with schizophrenia and then they wouldn't even have
a chance not to take the drugs!

SS: Unbelievable. Designing an implant to provide a constant dose of
a drug that they had just discovered causes pathology in the brain
chemistry.
RW: Right, they had just found that they're causing a worsening of
symptoms! So why would you go on to a design a permanent implant?
Because that's where the money was.
And no one wanted to deal with this horrible finding of an
enlargement of the basal ganglia caused by the drugs, and that is
associated with the worsening of symptoms. No one wanted to deal with
the fact that when you look at people medicated on antipsychotics,
you start to see a shrinking of the frontal lobes. No one wants to
talk about that either. They stopped that research.

SS: What other side effects are caused by prolonged use of these
antipsychotic drugs?
RW: Oh, you get tardive dyskinesia, a permanent brain dysfunction;
and akathisia, which is this incredible nervous agitation. You're
just never comfortable. You want to sit but you can't sit. It's like
you're crawling out of your own skin. And it's associated with
violence, suicide and all sorts of horrible things.

SS: Those kinds of side-effects were notorious with the first
generation of antipsychotic drugs, like Thorazine, Haldol and
Stelazine. But, just as with Prozac, so many people are still touting
the new generation of atypical antipsychotics -- Zyprexa, Clozaril
and Risperdal -- as wonder drugs that control mental illness with far
fewer side effects. Is that true? What have you found?
RW: No, it's just complete nonsense. In fact, I think the newer drugs
will eventually be seen as more dangerous than the old drugs, if
that's possible. As you know, the standard neuroleptics like
Thorazine and Haldol have had quite a litany of harm with the tardive
dyskinesia and all.
So when we got the new atypical drugs, they were touted as so much
safer. But with these new atypicals, you get all sorts of metabolic
dysfunctions.

Let's talk about Zyprexa. It has a different profile. So it may not
cause as much tardive dyskinesia. It may not cause as many
Parkinsonian symptoms. But it causes a whole range of new symptoms.
So, for example, it's more likely to cause diabetes. It's more likely
to cause pancreatic disorders. It's more likely to cause obesity and
appetite-disregulation disorders.

In fact, researchers in Ireland reported in 2003 that since the
introduction of the atypical antipsychotics, the death rate among
people with schizophrenia has doubled. They have done death rates of
people treated with standard neuroleptics and then they compare that
with death rates of people treated with atypical antipsychotics, and
it doubles. It doubles! It didn't reduce harm. In fact, in their
seven-year study, 25 of the 72 patients died.

SS: What were the causes of death?
RW: All sorts of physical illnesses, and that's part of the point.
You're getting respiratory problems, you're getting people dying of
incredibly high cholesterol counts, heart problems, diabetes. With
olanzapine (Zyprexa), one of the problems is that you're really
screwing up the core metabolic system. That's why you get these huge
weight gains, and you get the diabetes. Zyprexa basically disrupts
the machine that we are that processes food and extracts energy from
that food. So this very fundamental thing that we humans do is
disrupted, and at some point you just see all these pancreatic
problems, faulty glucose regulation, diabetes, etc. That's really a
sign that you're mucking with something very fundamental to life.

SS: There's supposedly an alarming increase in mental illness being
diagnosed in children. Millions are diagnosed with depression,
bipolar and psychotic symptoms, attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Is this explosive new
prevalence of mental illness among children a real increase, or is it
a marketing campaign that enriches the psychiatric drug industry, a
bonanza for the pharmaceutical corporations?
RW: You're touching on something now that is a tragic scandal of
monumental proportions. I talk sometimes to college classes,
psychology classes. You cannot believe the percentage of youth who
have been told they were mentally ill as kids, that something was
wrong with them. It's absolutely phenomenal. It's absolutely cruel to
be telling kids that they have these broken brains and mental
illnesses.

There's two things that are happening here. One, of course, is that
it's complete nonsense. As you remember as a kid, you have too much
energy or you behave sometimes in not altogether appropriate ways,
and you do have these extremes of emotions, especially during your
teenage years. Both children and teenagers can be very emotional. So
one thing that's going on is that they take childhood behaviors and
start defining behaviors they don't like as pathological. They start
defining emotions that are uncomfortable as pathological. So part of
what we're doing is pathologizing childhood with straight-out
definition stuff. We're pathologizing poverty among kids.

For example, if you're a foster kid, and maybe you drew a bad straw
in the lottery of life and are born into a dysfunctional family and
you get put into foster care, do you know what happens today? You
pretty likely are going to get diagnosed with a mental disorder, and
you're going to be placed on a psychiatric drug. In Massachusetts,
it's something like 60 to 70 percent of kids in foster care are now
on psychiatric drugs. These kids aren't mentally ill! They got a raw
deal in life. They ended up in a foster home, which means they were
in a bad family situation, and what does our society do? They
say: "You have a defective brain." It's not that society was bad and
you didn't get a fair deal. No, the kid has a defective brain and has
to be put on this drug. It's absolutely criminal.

Let's talk about bipolar disorder among kids. As one doctor said,
that used to be so rare as to be almost nonexistent. Now we're seeing
it all over. Bipolar is exploding among kids. Well, partly you could
say that we're just slapping that label on kids more often; but in
fact, there is something real going on. Here's what's happening. You
take kids and put them on an antidepressant -- which we never used to
do -- or you put them on a stimulant like Ritalin. Stimulants can
cause mania; stimulants can cause psychosis.

SS: And antidepressants can also cause mania, as you pointed out.
RW: Exactly, so the kid ends up with a drug-induced manic or
psychotic episode. Once they have that, the doctor at the emergency
room doesn't say, "Oh, he's suffering from a drug-induced episode."
He says he's bipolar.

SS: Then they give him a whole new drug for the mental disorder
caused by the first drug.
RW: Yeah, they give him an antipsychotic drug; and now he's on a
cocktail of drugs, and he's on a path to becoming disabled for life.
That's an example of how we're absolutely making kids sick.

SS: It's like society or their schools are trying to make them
manageable and they end up putting them on a chemical roller coaster
against their will.
RW: Absolutely.

SS: There's an astonishing number of kids being given Ritalin to cure
hyperactivity. But what 10-year-old boy in a confined school setting
isn't hyperactive? You write that the effect of Ritalin on the
dopamine system is very similar to cocaine and amphetamines.
RW: Ritalin is methylphenidate. Now methylphenidate affects the brain
in exactly the same way as cocaine. They both block a molecule that
is involved in the reuptake of dopamine.

SS: So they both increase the dopamine levels in the brain?
RW: Exactly. And they do it with a similar degree of potency. So
methylphenidate is very similar to cocaine. Now, one difference is
whether you're snorting it or if it's in a pill. That partly changes
how quickly it's metabolized. But still, it basically affects the
brain in the same way. Now, methylphenidate was used in research
studies to deliberately stir psychosis in schizophrenics. Because
they knew that you could take a person with a tendency towards
psychosis, give them methylphenidate, and cause psychosis. We also
knew that amphetamines, like methylphenidate, could cause psychosis
in people who had never been psychotic before.

So think about this. We're giving a drug to kids that is known to
have the possibility of stirring psychosis. Now, the odd thing about
methylphenidate and amphetamines is that, in kids, they sort of have
a counterintuitive effect. What does speed do in adults? It makes
them more jittery and hyperactive. For whatever reasons, in kids
amphetamines will actually still their movements; it will actually
keep them in their chairs and make them more focused. So you've got
kids in boring schools. The boys are not paying attention and they're
diagnosed with ADHD and put on a drug that is known to stir
psychosis. The next thing you know, a fair number of them are not
doing well by the time they're 15, 16, 17. Some of those kids talk
about how when you're on these drugs for the long term, you start
feeling like a zombie; you don't feel like yourself.

SS: Hollowed-out, blunted emotions. And this is being done to
millions of kids.
RW: Millions of kids! Think about what we're doing. We're robbing
kids of their right to be kids, their right to grow, their right to
experience their full range of emotions, and their right to
experience the world in its full hue of colors. That's what growing
up is, that's what being alive is! And we're robbing kids of their
right to be. It's so criminal. And we're talking about millions of
kids who have been affected this way. There are some colleges where
something like 40 to 50 percent of the kids arrive with a psychiatric
prescription.

SS: It looks like a huge social-control mechanism. Society gives kids
Ritalin and antidepressants to subdue them and make them conform. On
the one hand, it's all about social control and conformity. But it
also has a huge marketing payoff.
RW: You're right, it creates customers for the drugs, and hopefully
lifelong customers. That's what they're told, aren't they? They're
told they are going to be on these drugs for life. And next thing
they know, they're on two or three or four drugs. It's brilliant from
the capitalist point of view. It does serve some social-control
function. But you take a kid, and you turn them into a customer, and
hopefully a lifelong customer. It's brilliant.

We now spend more on antidepressants in this country than the Gross
National Product of mid-sized countries like Jordan. It's just
amazing amounts of money. The amount of money we spend on psychiatric
drugs in this country is more than the Gross National Product of two-
thirds of the world's countries. It's just this incredibly lucrative
paradigm of the mind that you can fix chemical imbalances in the
brain with these drugs. It works so well from a capitalistic point of
view for Eli Lilly. When Prozac came to market, Eli Lilly's value on
Wall Street, its capitalization, was around 2 billion dollars. By the
year 2000, the time when Prozac was its number-one drug, its
capitalization reached 80 billion dollars -- a forty-fold increase.

So that's what you really have to look at if you want to see why drug
companies have pursued this vision with such determination. It brings
billions of dollars in wealth in terms of increased stock prices to
the owners and managers of those companies. It also benefits the
psychiatric establishment that gets behind the drugs; they do well by
this. There's a lot of money flowing in the direction of those that
will embrace this form of care. There's advertisements that enrich
the media. It's all a big gravy train.

Unfortunately, the cost is dishonesty in our scientific literature,
the corruption of the FDA, and the absolute harm done to children in
this country drawn into this system, and an increase of 150,000 newly
disabled people every year in the United States for the last 17
years. That's an incredible record of harm done.

SS: Everyone gets rich -- the drug companies, the psychiatrists, the
researchers, the advertising agencies -- and the clients get drugged
out of their minds and damaged for life.
RW: And you know what's interesting? No one says that the mental
health of the American people is getting better. Instead, everyone
says we have this increasing problem They blame it on the stresses of
modern life or something like that, and they don't want to look at
the fact that we're creating mental illness.

Linda,

I can't exactly say that I felt I lambasted you just made my point of view known. My main issue is my experiences are different than yours and as I said before I have nothing against people sharing their experiences or worries but ultimately it is peoples personal choice whether they take drugs. I have nothing against the promotion of information but I feel it has to be done in an balanced way. I can probably dredge up websites siting the benefits of antidepressants but ultimately I don't promote their use I just say that I feel they help me and if people are on their lowest ebb it might help them.

My experience of drugs is also affected by the fact I have been working in Psychiatric care for 15 years and have met hundreds of people on many differing anti-psychotic and anti-depressive medication. I decided on the basis of how it affected the people I worked with it was a reasonably safe risk.

I am concerned when people have an axe to grind, in the grand scale of things this issue is irrelevant so I won't be continuing this debate