what was that all about?
a couple of excerpts:
As a clinician, I spent much of the last 25 years actually thinking that the SSRIs were both more efficacious and less toxic than the TCAs that preceded them. I didn’t believe that because I was a biological psychiatrist caught up in the whirlwind of the psychopharmacological revolution. It was just part of the general lore of the specialty. Both of those things were, in fact, wrong. I steered clear of certain of the SSRI/SNRI drugs because of withdrawal syndromes, but I didn’t learn about those things from the literature. I was made aware by seeing patients who’d had bad experiences. As a practicing psychiatrist, the things I’d relied on in the past to keep me up to speed on drugs, old and new, misinformed me. The intuition I had for what was science and what was advertisement no longer functioned as it had earlier in my career. In former days, I could count on Clinical Trials in peer-reviewed journals being performed on patients with the disorders listed in the article. I could no longer count on that being true. I could count on academic experts. Not any more. There was no solid ground. I would have been better off prescribing exactly as I had in 1977 when I finished my residency – TCA antidepressants, first generation antipsychotics, Lithium Carbonate, and Benzodiazepines [for anxiety that had to be treated].
Marlon Brando once said that he didn’t want to be lying on his deathbed thinking, "What was that all about?" Well that is how I think about a lot of the psychiatry that preoccupied the post DSM-III [1980] world. "What was that all about?"…read here.
A comment left in response to this post by Bernard Carroll Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Carroll is widely known as a clinical consultant; he is listed in The Best Doctors in America:
"What was that all about? It was about the illusion of ramping up clinical research to an industrial scale. The smoke and mirrors game required several key components: it was about dumbing down of diagnoses through checklists; it was about dumbing down of clinical assessments through structured interviews; it was about a belief that efficiency could be achieved through recruiting symptomatic volunteers rather than real patients who arrived via the inefficient clinical referral process; it was about imputing validity to on-line and telephone assessments; it was about a belief that brute force of numbers would overcome the crippling heterogeneity of enrolled subjects; it was about treating patients as commodities whose opinions on efficacy were disregarded; and it was about disease mongering with the goal of maximizing the market. Oh, and it was also about money – for the corporations and for the opportunistic helper academics and of course for the satellite industry of CROs and the like that sprang up. Along the way, the really incisive clinical research questions were studiously avoided. That is the dismal record of academic psychiatry over the past 30 years. These new data confirm the futility of those strategic blunders."
I am just a MadMother who has been aware of the utter lack of ethics and integrity which have allowed a relative few to drive a criminal enterprise right over the top of the people they claim to be helping. This is how psychopharmacology or bio-psychiatry "practices medicine."
I am only aware because my son is one of the countless victims. Victims were swept up in a rip-tide of deceit and carried away to an uncertain destiny by those convinced of their moral and medical authority, who lacked definitive empirical evidence to support the validity of a claim to be treating biological diseases with safe and effective treatments which were in reality teratogens. My awareness mattered not at all in the face of medical authority wielded with the power of the law itself. The manner in which bio-psychiatry is practiced, seems to purposely prohibit parents from protecting their own children. When a child dies as a direct result of the so called, "safe and effective treatment" it is a "natural" death. I am certain that it is not natural to bury one's child. I am certain it is not natural for a mother to have no say about a child's care.
I can assure you it is not 'natural' to witness my child being traumatized and disabled by neuroleptic drugs. I was told I had no say. It is not natural to witness my son become physically sick, and witness the ongoing neurological, metabolic and cognitive iatrogenic damage caused by drugs. It is not natural to have unethical psychiatrists continue to prescribe drugs without any appreciable benefit; i.e. reduction in symptoms that offsets iatrogenic harm. Totally careless, disregarding ethics. A professional distant gaze blinded by conviction is hubris without insight.
It was horrifying to see my teenager stumble to the ground like a toddler. It was heartbreaking to have my child beg me to rescue him, and dream of having mercenaries rescue him. I can still see the look of absolute terror my child had and I still hear his desperate pleas reverberate...
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