There was in the mid 1800's a form of psychiatric care called "morel treatment" and they managed on average to discharge between 50-80% of patients as cured and over a 15 year follow up less than 10% had been readmitted. Of those that were discharged over half were able to return to full time work, marry, have children, ec. It is that history of psychiatry that people manage to conviently neglect to mention.
Someone starts thinking strange and we have a need to fix it, and we need a physical way to do that. Yet what research shows us, and this is true even of studies being done today is that people will given time and space in the vast majority of situations naturally recover. Depression can be serious for some people, but we all get sad, especially when people die and the like, do we all need to be placed on medication then?? What happened to having normal emotions, being able to cry when we are hurt, etc. I am not saying that medications do not have a role to play, but if you honestly knew the TRUE research for these things, then you would not worship the ground they walk on. I do take some psychotropic medications. I am well aware of the long term damage they are causing me, and look to long term studies and not the short term ones the drug companies fund, which are specifically designed to make their own drug look superior. In fact the Food and Drug Administration normally puts excessively tight advertising controls on pscyhotropic drugs, because the studies they submit to get the drugs approved are the worst science could produce. BUT the drug companies get around that by paying psychiatrists huge sums of money to spread rumors about the drugs.
How did the newer generations of antipsycotics get there results. First of all they put every single patient on placebo for 4 weeks to see if they would naturally recover, then they compared them to a minimal does of the new drug and above maximum accepted doses of the older ones, they allowed the patients in the trail to be on any other medications at the same time, including benzo's, only study people for 4 weeks and explain all side effects as a result of the conidtion, for the withdrawl effects we put people on excessively high doses for few months and then looked at how they responded when the medications were abruptly withdrawn, not tapered, rather than those who remained on the drugs, etc. ALL of this is in the medical literature and the National Institute of Mental Health now says that ALL the research now shows that there is absolutely no difference in the effectiveness of the newer medications, no differnce in the side effects of them to the older ones, etc and that there is no difference in the ability of people to stay on the drugs due to profound and life threatening side effects. The only difference is that the newer ones are still on patents and cost 10 times the amount of the older ones, for nothing more than a publicity stunt. There is no research in the medical field at this presnet time that supports the myth that the newer drugs are superior and infact the Lancet in the UK has recently published an article saying that we could easily have had the drugs introduced in the opposite order and believe the opposite!! ! The new ones are sold by saying they impact on more areas of the brain, but we could easily make the claim that the older ones are more effective than the newer by focusing directly on only one area of the brain!! !
Research funded by the National Institute of Mental Health consistently shows that those who wean themselves off drugs have the best long term outcomes, less chance of remission, more chance of recovery, etc. Research shows that people do better over the very short term, ie, 4 weeks on medication, but after that the outcomes tend to equal and once you get to 18 months to 2 years people begin to do better if they have not been on meds. But the resarch funded by drug companies to get the drugs approved for use do not show that, and they explained things as simple as a dry mouth as a result of the condition itself and not a side effect of the drug!! No ethical research can be conducted in the way those studies were and yet they did not need to prove that it was more effective, less harmful, etc. Just that it may be of benefit to some people.
Psychiatry more than any other medical speciality recieves huge royalities from drug companies more than any other medical specialty. The amount of psychiatrists who are paid by drug companies to sell the drugs is way out of proportion to any other medical speciality.
Newer research is being conducted into ECT that allows them to really test the placebo affect acurately. In the past we gave some ECT and some nothing. Now we give them all the anisthetic, all the muscle relaxant that in itself causes sore muslces when you wake up and then wheel them away where no nurses or treating psychiatirsts cannot know who is getting the actual shocks and who isn't and for the first time we find that ECT shows much worse results than placebo. In the past people were convinced that this must be doing something. Psychiatry by its very nature is subjective and if they wanted to find some change they could. Now they have no idea if they need to find a change or not.
Again research by the National Insitute of Mental Health is finding that antipsychotics create brain damage, kill parts of the brain, and shrink others, and cause permanent cognitive impairments that are purely dose related. Does this mean that it should all be banned, no, but it does mean that the truth must be told and people not placed on these drugs purely to sedate them. Chemotherapy for cancer is hardly good for you, but people are allowed to make an informed decision about its use and the expected outcome is better than if it is not given. We do not for instance expect people to be on chemotherapy for life on the basis that it may prevent us from getting cancer, but many are saying that it is OK and actually helpful to do that for people at risk of psychosis, even if the false positive rate is 70%+
The fact is our outcomes for mental illness today are the worst they have ever been. The number of people becoming chronically disabled by their condition to the point of not being able to work, live alone, etc is at the highest level of all times. If the medications that we have are so good then why are the outcomes today worse than the were at the start of the twentith century when the treatment of the day was to wrap people in wet towels to cool down the brain!!
There is program in finland that is showing brillant outcomes, with minimal use of antipsychotic drugs. They use what they have defined as need apated treatment and open dialouge therapy, with the whole family and later extended family, friends, neighbours, teachers, etc. They try to keep people off the med's initially but if needed will use benzo's as they can sedate the person in much the same way, without the cocktail of side effects. Over half of all patients are never placed on an antipsychotic and the outcomes for that group are the best, they fully recover, go back to full time work or study, marry, raise families, etc, things we do not see in the populaton of people maintained on medication. That does not mean that they are what normal people do, but the fact is the vast majority of people who are severly mentally ill today cannot do those things, if they want to. Finland do place some people on low doses as they do better on them, and research consistently shows that about 5% of the population do do better maintained on medication long term, but we have no idea of how to find out who these five percent are.
As for brain scans of every person the only differences found in the brain scans of normal people verses those with a mental illness are found once they are medicated. Before medication they have no changes in the brain. They assume that serotonin is involved in depression becasue the drugs they treat it with affect that transmittor, not because they found out about the serotonin first. The same is true for dopamine and schizophrenia. This is also why people are so anti psychiatry, as they come up with treatments then try to find a justification for those treatments, not because they found something wrong and then try to find a way to alleviate that problem.
I am not anti psychiatry, but I am anti the mental health system, that lies to people, does not tell them the truth and does not allow them to make informed decisions for themselves. The only research on long term outcomes consistently shows that people are better off not on med's and yet we are told to stay on them because the intital withdrawl studies were so flawed!! ! As for the need for forced care, why do we need it for children as well. Parents have the legal right to refuse chemotherapy for a child with cancer, to refuse a blood transfusion on the grounds of religion, to refuse vaccinations and the like. I am not saying that is right or wrong, but if parents have the right to refuse that why not the right to refuse psychiatric treatment. And if people are not capeable of making informed decisions then why can they not allow a loved one to make those decisions for them, or have gaurdians appointed or the like. We have people who are profoundly mentally ill who are under guardianship orders and the guardians have the right to make all sorts of decisions they are not allowed to seek a second opinion on mental illness, cannot refuse to medicate, cannot refuse ECT or the like. Why are the only people able to make those decisions, psychiatrists, the exact same people who treat them. If that is the case then why are social workers not the best people to make decisons about child abuse, why are the police not the best people to make decisions about criminals and why are disability workers not the best people to make decisions about disabled people with cognitive impairments. If people need to have someone else make decisions for them and there are times for that then that person should be independent, not the person who makes the recommendation that we remove the persons rights in the first place.
24 Nov 2010, 6:46 pm
Next one I went to actually helped me.
