Tag Archives: psychiatric drugs

Profiting from mental ill-health

There’s a reason psychiatrists prescribe drugs rather than talking therapy: the latter makes no money for pharmaceutical firms. The New York Times recently led with a front-page splash about psychiatry’s propensity to prescribe pills, “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy”. That news is already widely known in the mental health field, but it has vast ramifications for Americans trying to maintain their sanity in our market-driven and medical system for delivering mental healthcare. What does the turn to drug therapy mean for the mass of Americans?

Dr. Peter Breggin, psychiatrist—”Join the Empathic Transformation”

As the recent New York Times story confirms, most psychiatrists don’t even do psychotherapy anymore; they simply diagnose and drug. As I first described in Toxic Psychiatry, medically-oriented mental health professionals have become remote from their patients whom they now seek to manipulate chemically rather than to know personally.

In the field we call mental health, the rampant diagnosing, drugging, and incarcerating of those we seek to help must be replaced by practices that encourage responsibility and freedom rather than compliance and docility. By working directly in the field of ethical human services and sciences, we can become a leading part in the grassroots movement we call the Empathic Transformation.

All over the world, those of us who practice the healing arts–physical, psychological and spiritual–are seeing the need to join together to further humanity’s empathic transformation–to transform the old ways into something better and even grander, into practices embedded in and imbued with empathy.

The world is changing and we need to lead the movement in our fields toward a view of human beings that never demeans and always empowers, that never forces but always encourages, and that recognizes that human beings are not ultimately driven by their instincts and their biochemical but by their ideals and principles.

False peace of mind – Antidepressant Placebos

Beginning in 1998, a series of studies have repeatedly questioned the difference in efficacies between antidepressant drugs and placebos. Pioneering analysis work done by University of Connecticut researchers Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein confirmed the effectiveness of antidepressants – but also their inert counterparts. In 38 studies conducted with over 3,000 depressed patients, placebos improved symptoms 75 per cent as much as legitimate medications.

“We wondered, what’s going on?” said Kirsch in a 2010 interview with Newsweek. The medical community, skeptical of his analysis, asked him to instigate a more comprehensive study with the results of all clinical trials conducted by antidepressant manufacturers, including those unpublished – 47 studies in total.

Over half of the studies showed no significant difference in the depression-alleviating effects of a medicated versus non-medicated pill. With this more thorough analysis, which now included strategically unpublished studies from pharmaceutical companies, placebos were shown to improve symptoms 82 per cent as much as the real pill.

Dealing With Depression Naturally

According to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, approximately 10 percent of Americans are taking antidepressant medications.

This means that over 31 million Americans are gobbling Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Elavil, Norpramin, Luvox, Paxil, Wellbutrin and other antidepressant psychiatric drugs like M & M’s. This drug use accounts for billions of dollars in pharmaceutical sales annually (9.6 U.S. billion in 2008).

Yet according to a landmark study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, antidepressant medications work – as well as placebos and not more. In other words, people in depression studies who are given sugar pills instead of antidepressant drugs do as well as the group who gets the drugs.

The hidden tyranny: children diagnosed and drugged for profit

Thomas Edison, one of the world’s most prolific inventors, was kicked out of school at an early age as his teacher lost patience with his persistent questions and wandering mind. Where would we be now if his creative spirit had been numbed by prescription drugs? Albert Einstein, father of modern physics, was a quiet child who kept his distance from his peers. He resented the rote learning methods enforced in school and was labeled a foolish day dreamer. Imagine if he had been medicated into conformity. Winston Churchill, the great statesman and orator, had an independent and rebellious nature as a youth and was often in trouble. Surely he would have been deemed ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) by today’s psychiatric standards. Frederick Douglass, one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement (and a blood relative of Umar R. Abdullah-Johnson, quoted above) began defying the rules for blacks when he was a child. And the list goes on.