The Hidden Epidemic, full Robert Whitaker Interview

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This is an interesting story, and perhaps it explains some of the acceleration of strange behavior in the west in younger generations in addition to 'mouse utopia' type conditions of accelerating cross-competition.

A story that I haven't told very often because it just doesn't come up - I was put on Haldol and an antidepressant when I was 11, my parents ended up telling the psychiatrists enough to believe that I had Tourette's, I told them things that made them think I had schizo-effective issues along with my PDD-NOS, so on a battery of meds I went and I started really noticing a mental deterioration by the time I was in the middle of high school along with a low-grade akasthesia (a bit like restless leg syndrome but full body, incredibly pervasively uncomfortable but nothing close to Jordan Peterson with Klonopin), we'd tried rotating meds, after a couple of years the Haldol was changed to Risperidal, I was still on antidepressants and often some fragmentary third for anti-anxiety, and by the time I was in my junior or senior year of high school I really believed that I'd be lucky to graduate high school and that I might even need to be in assisted living for the rest of my life (my development was also WAY behind my peers in a lot of ways). It took a friend of a friend, when we were out of town in 1999 going to a three day music event, giving me a write-up on antipsychotics, pretty much illustrating that most of the problems I was having were side effects, to convince me to pull myself off of my meds over six weeks.

It was difficult, and interestingly enough I was on either Klonopin or Clonadine at the time so I was ratcheting three down and having some hallucinations. I was determined though and had, at least for the moment, a conspiracy in my mind that an industry was damaging me for $$ and creating a deliberately exploitative relationship in that sense. Obviously it turned out that I was at least part wrong - ie. I got better, got my mind back, found myself making far more sense, rebounding in terms of being adult and coherent in my thinking (around 20), but my first real brush with 'still being autistic' was finding out that people still found me 'different' and hated my guts for it for reasons that nothing in my behavior toward them or attempts at modulating my own behavior could fix. Eventually somewhere in my early 20's I had a Darwinian understanding of that which lasted for a while, kinda dipped for a bit in my 30's while I considered other factors, but needless to day I was on the mend with caveats. I did notice a sense that I was feeling incredibly underpowered, a bit like my functioning shortfalls could be described (I told friends this) that the way I felt was like a 700 watt subwoofer being powered by a 20 watt amp to the point that no matter what I knew or what I could track it's a bit like other people could run laps around me and just about smack me in the face with my own hands if they chose. I ended up trying a bunch of different nootropics, found some help from that but noticed finally that it was the stimulant effect that caused that - so back to a psychiatrist I went, got on time-release Adderall.

I learned about my body in this period that even the mildest SSRI's would cause more side effects over time, ie. I had a paradoxical or reverse tolerance to pretty much all of them where I'd start losing personality and then, in zero-sum situations rather than just having anxiety they gave me something to be afraid of because I was made weaker in front of other people. Effexor was so bad that I had to quit within 72 hours of trying it, and the psychiatrist I was seeing was actually fine with that because she knew that I could be counted on to accurately report my states and know when something was going south. Similarly I was able to stay on Adderall for about nine or ten months before the reverse tolerance kicked in and I had to get off of it but the good news - that chemical divit that I think years of being on antipsychotics seems to have been pushed back out by my time on Adderall and after that I haven't touched a psychiatric drug for 14 years.

That said I've come to see all sides of this issue quite personally. If someone is having a lot of problems and the medications help them a lot without significant side effects people shouldn't be telling them that it's poison or to get off of it, maybe to be careful not to fall into the trap of 'more is always better' but find the right balance where their taking the steering wheel at least enough to be building coping mechanisms. Similarly though there are a lot of people, and several years back I heard as many as 60% or more, who either have an equal gain-loss between benefit and side effect or have side-effects that outweigh the benefits.

What Robert seems to be talking about here is our post 1970's 'myth of progress' with relation to the sciences going into BS mode a bit with the status of psychiatric meds, overselling what they can do considerably, and from that the self-writing trap of profits and people loving convenience and more than happy to shell out for the promise it all seemed to find the sweet spot that many wayward industries can when they find an equally wayward and malleable populace.

Wow. That's quite a life experience. I'm glad you made it through.

And yes: meds are overhyped, by the industry, but also all too readily accepted by a society that sees no value in people not delivering "optimal performance". What should you do with a family member who needs special attention but you have to go out and work? Sedation.

SSRIs are absolute crap.

Exactly. Robert stated in the interview that he's been trying to bring public awareness to the admissions that the field of psychiatry itself has made regarding the efficacy of psychiatric meds and people have been ignoring it - I'm pretty certain for precisely that reason, ie. plausible deniability to do what they wanted to do anyway which is offload responsibility.

Well.... Responsibility is a luxury few people can afford, I'm afraid.

Agreed there too - somewhat, ie. that it's a case of shareholder profits getting externalized in the case of parents working too much. At the same time though, at least here in the US, I know enough people who watch plenty of TV and would do this kind of thing. Could they be out of their depth in dealing with a child that's different from them? Perhaps, but that's where it gets all the more sick when the professional they get shuffled of to says 'Ah, I have a medication for that!'.

It's the steady stream of failure from our professional class that Eric Weinstein often talks about.