Mental illness

[Cunt]

I have had some small, non-professional experience with mental illness and have for a long time thought the 'chemical imbalance in the brain' line smelled of bullshit. Mainly I thought so because anyone I know who was told this, when asked, told me that no brain samples were ever taken and tested.
So I guessed that the physician simply inferred it from the symptoms.

Another problem I have had is that the doctor will (again, limited experience talking here) prescribe for a condition (like a chemical imbalance), then when more problems occur, rather than stop medicating, will prescribe new meds based on what was wrong while the patient was taking the old (incorrect, apparently) meds. Lather, rinse, repeat for life.

I try to be cautious when I read something which agrees so firmly with me, so I ask anyone here with some experience to share what they know about this author, the premise or the subject in general. I have attached the bit I read so far, and welcome any contributions.

The Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America"
By Bruce E. Levine

"In 1987, prior to Prozac hitting the market and the current ubiquitous use of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, the U.S. mental illness disability rate was 1 in every 184 Americans, but by 2007 the mental illness disability rate had more than doubled to 1 in every 76 Americans. Robert Whitaker was curious as to what was causing this dramatic increase in mental illness disability. The answers are in his new book, "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America" (Crown Publishers, April 2010).

Whitaker’s findings will create a problem for both Big Pharma and establishment psychiatry, but his credentials and his craftsmanship will make it difficult to marginalize him. Whitaker is the author of four books including "Mad in America," about the mistreatment of the mentally ill; and as a reporter for the Boston Globe, he won a George Polk Award for medical writing, a National Association of Science Writers Award for best magazine article, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. In the tradition of Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and other investigative reporters who get taken seriously, Whitaker is scrupulous, fair, and describes complex phenomena in a way that is easy to understand.

Levine: So mental illness disability rates have doubled since 1987 and increased six-fold since 1955. And at the same time, psychiatric drug use greatly increased in the 1950s and 1960s, then skyrocketed after 1988 when Prozac hit the market, so now antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs alone gross more than $25 billion annually in the U.S. But as you know, correlation isn’t causation. What makes you feel that the increase in psychiatric drug use is a big part of the reason for the increase in mental illness?

Whitaker: The rise in the disability rate due to mental illness is simply the starting point for the book. The disability numbers don’t prove anything, but, given that this astonishing increase has occurred in lockstep with our society’s increased use of psychiatric medications, the numbers do raise an obvious question. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling the increase in disability rates? And in order to investigate that question, you need to look at two things. First, do psychiatric medications alter the long-term course of mental disorders for the better, or for the worse? Do they increase the likelihood that a person will be able to function well over the long-term, or do they increase the likelihood that a person will end up on disability? Second, is it possible that a person with a mild disorder may have a bad reaction to an initial drug, and that puts the person onto a path that can lead to long-term disability. For instance, a person with a mild bout of depression may have a manic reaction to an antidepressant, and then is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on a cocktail of medications. Does that happen with any frequency? Could that be an iatrogenic [physician-caused illness] pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability rates?

So that’s the starting point for the book. What I then did was look at what the scientific literature - a literature that now extends over 50 years - has to say about those questions. And the literature is remarkably consistent in the story it tells. Although psychiatric medications may be effective over the short term, they increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill over the long term. I was startled to see this picture emerge over and over again as I traced the long-term outcomes literature for schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, and bipolar illness. In addition, the scientific literature shows that many patients treated for a milder problem will worsen in response to a drug- say have a manic episode after taking an antidepressant - and that can lead to a new and more severe diagnosis like bipolar disorder. That is a well-documented iatrogenic pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability numbers. Now there may be various cultural factors contributing to the increase in the number of disabled mentally ill in our society. But the outcomes literature - and this really is a tragic story - clearly shows that our drug-based paradigm of care is a primary cause.

Levine: I have a clinical practice and I have seen several examples of what you are talking about, and I had previously read several of the scientific studies that you detail in Anatomy of an Epidemic, so I am not exactly a naïve reader. However, in reading your book and seeing the enormity of the problem and just how much overwhelming evidence there is for a horrible crisis, I started getting a little sick to my stomach. I wonder, as you got into the research, did you start drawing comparisons to Rachel Carson and Silent Spring? Specifically, this is such a huge unnecessary tragedy, affecting several million people including children, yet there is virtually no discussion of it in the mass media.
Whitaker: A journalist friend of mine, who was a long-time reporter at the Washington Post and Newsday, said that he too was reminded of Silent Spring when he read Anatomy of an Epidemic. And, in fact, I was stunned by much of what I found when I was researching the book, and I did at times become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the tragedy. Let me give a specific example. When you research the rise of juvenile bipolar illness in this country, you see that it appears in lockstep with the prescribing of stimulants for ADHD and antidepressants for depression. Prior to the use of those medications, you find that researchers reported that manic-depressive illness, which is what bipolar illness was called at the time, virtually never occurred in prepubertal children. But once psychiatrists started putting “hyperactive” children on Ritalin, they started to see prepubertal children with manic symptoms. Same thing happened when psychiatrists started prescribing antidepressants to children and teenagers. A significant percentage had manic or hypomanic reactions to the antidepressants. Thus, we see these two iatrogenic pathways to a juvenile bipolar diagnosis documented in the medical literature. And then what happens to the children and teenagers who end up with this diagnosis? They are now put on heavier-duty drugs and often on a drug cocktail, and you find that they do poorly on that treatment. You find that a high percentage end up “rapid cyclers,” which means they have severe “bipolar” symptoms, and that they can now be expected to be chronically ill throughout their lives.

We also know that the atypical antipsychotics [such as Risperdal and Zyprexa] prescribed to bipolar children cause a host of physical problems, and there is pretty good evidence that they cause cognitive decline over the long term. When you add up all this information, you end up documenting a story of how the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in the United States have been destroyed in this way. In fact, I think that the number of children and teenagers that have ended up “bipolar” after being treated with a stimulant or an antidepressant is now well over one million. This is a story of harm done on an unimaginable scale.

So why hasn’t the media reported on this? The answer is that the media, when it covers medicine, basically repeats the narrative fashioned by the academic doctors who are leaders in the particular discipline, and in this case, academic psychiatrists have told a story of new illnesses - like juvenile bipolar illness - being “discovered,” and of drugs for those treatments that are safe, effective and necessary. They tell this story to the public even as their own studies find that their juvenile bipolar patients - who when they first came to a psychiatrist might simply have been “hyperactive” or struggling with a momentary bout of depression - are ending up with severe bipolar symptoms and can now expect to be chronically ill for life. The problem is that our society trusts academic doctors to tell an honest story, and in this corner of medicine, it's quite easy to document - and I did document this in Anatomy of an Epidemic - that academic psychiatry has belied that trust.

Levine: Let’s get to the issue of psychiatric medications fixing “chemical imbalances.” This idea was absolutely crucial in making Prozac and other antidepressants attractive to depressed patients. However, these days even much of the psychiatry establishment has backed off the idea that depressed people have too little serotonin between their synapses and that antidepressants fix this chemical imbalance. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help but see the comparison between Big Pharma and the Bush Administration, which told Americans that the U.S. needed to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and he was connected to Al Qaeda. Of course, the Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda connection was simply a lie, and the WMD rationale proved to be false. Do you believe that Big Pharma and establishment psychiatry were lying about this chemical imbalance theory at the time Prozac hit the market in 1988, or do you believe that they had hoped this theory was true because it sold drugs - and it just turned out to be wrong?
Whitaker: The low-serotonin theory of depression was first investigated in the 1970s and early 1980s, and those studies did not find that people diagnosed with depression had “low serotonin.” As the NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] noted in 1984 at the conclusion of such investigations: “Elevations or decrements in the functioning of serotonergic systems per se are not likely to be associated with depression.” So why was the public told differently?

The answer is a bit complicated. In the late 1970s, the market for psychiatric drugs declined and psychiatry suddenly saw itself as a profession under “siege,” having now to compete with a burgeoning number of psychologists and other non-physician therapists for patients. In response, the profession - at its highest levels - decided to sell the public on a biomedical model of mental disorders, as that model would naturally emphasize the importance of taking “medications” for a disease and it was only psychiatrists who could prescribe those drugs. This story-telling began with the publication of DSM-III in 1980, which the American Psychiatric Association (APA) heralded as a grand “scientific achievement,” and then soon the APA was announcing that great discoveries were being made about the biology of mental disorders. And once psychiatry began to tell a story that wasn’t science based, but rather was best described as a marketing campaign, I think it began to believe its own marketing slogans. I don’t know this for a fact, but I am willing to bet that Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and others began to believe their own public pronouncements about weapons of mass destruction and a Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda connection, and I think something similar to that happened in American psychiatry when Prozac came to market. The field stopped looking at the science that showed that the low-serotonin theory of depression had basically already flamed out, and instead began to believe its own propaganda.

Moreover, the chemical-imbalance story did more than just spur sales of drugs. It provided psychiatrists with a desirable public image. They were now like doctors in infectious medicine and other respected specialties, their medications “like insulin for diabetes.” The chemical-imbalance story told of medical progress, of a discipline that was unlocking the mysteries of the brain. Indeed, when Prozac came to market, there were newspaper stories about how psychiatry now had a new reason to “feel proud,” and how its public image had improved. So in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chemical imbalance story is not one that tells of how lying moved into the heart of the field, but rather how professional delusion did.

At some later point, however, as the chemical imbalance story repeatedly fell apart, psychiatrists in the research community understood that they were telling a “fib.” I can still remember - this was the summer of 1998 - when I questioned a prominent academic psychiatrist about whether the chemical imbalance story was really “true” and he replied by stating that it was a “useful metaphor” that “helped patients understand why they needed to take their medication.” This really is the tragedy of modern psychiatry - it became a medical discipline devoted to telling a public story that made its drugs look good, as opposed to telling a story rooted in honest science.

Levine: Big Pharma and their partners in establishment psychiatry would like the general public to believe that the only critics of psychiatry are Scientologists. In reality, most scientists who are critics of psychiatry are also critics of the pseudoscience of Scientology. It is my experience that serious critics of psychiatry are not anti-drug zealots. For example, I know that you have talked with “psychiatric survivors” - ex-patients who want to reform mental health treatment. David Oaks, one of the leading activists in the psychiatric survivor movement, often repeats that some members of his MindFreedom organization continue to take their psychiatric drugs while many choose not to, and what MindFreedom and other psychiatric survivors are fighting for is truly informed choice and a wider range of treatment options. Do you think that David Oaks’s fight is the right one?
Whitaker: Big Pharma and their partners in establishment psychiatry have smartly used Scientology to defuse criticism of their medications. I honestly believe that if Scientology weren't around, then our society could have a much more rational discussion about our drug-based paradigm of care. As for the position taken by MindFreedom and other psychiatric survivors, I basically do think that is the right one to take, with two caveats. In order to make a “truly informed choice,” a person needs to know the long-term effects of a treatment. It’s not enough for people to be fully informed about the immediate “side effects” of a drug. People need to be presented with information about whether such treatment has been shown to better the long-term course of the disorder, or worsen it. They need to be told about long-term physical and cognitive problems that often arise with every day use of psychiatric drugs. So providing people with a “truly informed choice” is a tall order.

My second caveat is this: As a society, we expect the medical community to develop the best possible form of care. We do not expect a medical community to offer a therapy that regularly leads to a bad end. And so, if we were to draw up a blueprint for reforming the current paradigm of care, it would be nice if the psychiatric community would try to develop therapeutic approaches that involved using psychiatric medications in a selective, cautious way that best promoted good long-term outcomes. In other words, I think psychiatry does have a responsibility to develop a true evidence-based model for using its drugs, a model that incorporates the long-term outcomes data. In the solution section of Anatomy of an Epidemic, I write of how doctors and psychologists in northern Finland use antipsychotics in a selective, cautious manner when treating first-episode psychotic patients, and their long-term outcomes are, by far, the best in the Western World. So if you believe in evidence-based medicine, then American psychiatry should look to the Finnish program as a model for reform. Doctors have a responsibility to lead, but I think that you see in David Oaks’ position a belief that establishment psychiatry in America cannot be trusted to provide such leadership. He’s right to believe that, of course, and that's what is so tragic about modern American psychiatry."
- http://counterpunch.org/levine04282010.html
Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and his latest book is "Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy" (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His Web site is http://www.brucelevine.net

[Cunt]

A pal sent me a bit more...so I will share.

Diagnosing the ‘DSM-5’
Shrink revolt!
• By Jennifer Senior
• Published Apr 25, 2010
Two Jews may, as the saying goes, have three opinions, but that appears to be a fairly modest ratio when compared with psychiatrists. It was inevitable that revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders would invite controversy—it’s the classic reference work for mental-health professionals, and a convenient field guide to understanding crazy exes for the rest of us—but even the American Psychiatric Association, which first appointed the work groups to update the text two years ago, couldn’t have predicted the squabbles now under way. Dr. Allen Frances, the man who chaired the task force that created the current edition (the DSM-IV), has today emerged as the most trenchant, and relentless, critic of the proposed revisions to the upcoming edition (the DSM-5; among the changes is a transition to Arabic numerals). Last Tuesday was the final day those revisions were open to public comment. “And hopefully,” Frances says, “most of them will drop out.”
Basically, Frances believes that the first draft of the DSM-5 is too promiscuous with its labels, both by loosening diagnostic criteria and by introducing a host of new and, to his mind, problematic maladies—like Binge Eating Disorder (more or less defined as gorging on massive amounts at least once a week for three months). By the estimate of one DSM-5 task-force member, Frances says, this disorder already afflicts 6 percent of the population. “And that,” he notes, “is before drug companies start marketing something for it.”
As Frances pointed out in a recent Los Angeles Times editorial, such taxonomic adjustments only seem to further shrink “the ever-shrinking domain of the normal.” Take another DSM-5 proposed addition: Temper Dysregulation Disorder With Dysphoria. Frances fears this may be deployed for kids who have typical temper problems. Or Major Depressive Episode: As it’s redefined, it could now be used to describe someone who’s spent two weeks grieving over a lost spouse, he contends. But the worst offender, in Frances’s view, is Psychosis Risk Syndrome, which attempts to identify and treat youngsters before they become psychotic. In his view, there isn’t any evidence that early intervention with medication helps, while there’s plenty to suggest that many teens could be misidentified. “And that I saw as a public-health danger,” he says, “because there are real drawbacks to being on antipsychotics.” Like weight gain and diabetes. “Those children are also disproportionately on Medicaid,” he adds.
One can, of course, sympathize with David Kupfer, the chairman of the DSM-5 task force (who said, via an assistant, he couldn’t speak before our deadline). The field has evolved since 1994, when the DSM-IV was first published, as have clinical practices. “Clinicians complain that the current DSM-IV system poorly reflects the clinical realities of their patients,” he and his colleagues wrote last summer in Psychiatric Times. “Researchers are skeptical that the existing DSM categories represent a valid basis for scientific investigations, and accumulating evidence supports this skepticism.” And the current version of the DSM-5 is only a draft, after all (it won’t be out until May 2013). Even Frances is compassionate about his plight. “If you’re an expert in the field,” he says, “you really resent it when you can’t find a specific diagnosis for every patient. But you have to avoid the temptation to make changes that’d have disastrous unintended consequences.”
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/65632/
--------------------------------------------
Robert Whitaker
Journalist and author of Mad in America, Anatomy of an Epidemic.
Posted: April 28, 2010 02:25 PM

'Anatomy Of An Epidemic': Could Psychiatric Drugs Be Fuelling A Mental
Illness Epidemic?

A few years ago, while writing an article about the merits of psychiatric
medications, I looked at whether the number of adults receiving a federal
disability payment due to mental illness had significantly changed since 1987, which was the year that Prozac was introduced. Our society's use of
psychiatric medications, of course, has soared since that time, and here's what I discovered: The number of adults, ages 18 to 65, on the federal disability rolls due to mental illness jumped from 1.25 million in 1987 to four million in 2007. Roughly one in every 45 working-age adults is now on government disability due to mental illness.
This epidemic has now struck our nation's children, too. The number of
children who receive a federal payment because of a severe mental illness rose from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007, a 35-fold increase.
I wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic to investigate this epidemic, and this
pursuit necessarily raises a very uncomfortable question. Although we, as a
society, believe that psychiatric medications have "revolutionized" the
treatment of mental illness, the disability numbers suggest a very different
possibility. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling this epidemic?
To answer that question, you need to pore through the scientific
literature for the past 50 years and piece together a documented account of how psychiatric drugs affect long-term outcomes. Do the medications help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or do they, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness? Researchers have studied these questions in a variety of ways, and their results tell a story that is, to the say the least, startling.
Here is just one of many such studies. In the 1980s, Martin Harrow, a
psychologist at the University of Illinois, began a long-term study of 64 newly
diagnosed schizophrenia patients. Every few years, he assessed how they were doing. Were they symptomatic? In recovery? Employed? Were they taking antipsychotic medications? The collective fate of the off-med and medicated patients began to diverge after two years, and by the end of 4.5 years, it was the off-medication group that was doing much better. Nearly 40% of the off-med group were "in recovery" and more than 60% were working, whereas only 6% of the medicated patients were "in recovery" and few were working. This divergence in outcomes remained throughout the next ten years, such that at the 15-year follow-up, 40% of those off drugs were in recovery, versus 5% of the medicated group.
As Harrow reported at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric
Association, "I conclude that patients with schizophrenia not on
antipsychotic medication for a long period of time have significantly better global functioning than those on antipsychotics."
This does not mean that antipsychotics don't have a place in psychiatry's
toolbox. But it does mean that psychiatry's use of these drugs needs to be
rethought, and fortunately, a model of care pioneered by a Finnish group in
western Lapland provides us with an example of the benefit that can come from doing so. Twenty years ago, they began using antipsychotics in a selective, cautious manner, and today the long-term outcomes of their first-episode psychotic patients are astonishingly good. At the end of five years, 85% of their patients are either working or back in school, and only 20% are taking antipsychotics.
In Anatomy of an Epidemic, I report on the long-term outcomes literature
for schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, and bipolar illness, and also the
literature that details outcomes for children treated with psychiatric
medications. My hope is that if our society can become informed about these
long-term studies, then it could have a reasonable discussion about embracing other models of care--like the one pioneered by the group in Finland--that have proven to help people get better and stay well too.
Source: The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-wh ... 55572.html
-------------------------------
It's not a disorder, it's just bad behaviour
By Naomi Lakritz, Canwest News ServiceApril 30, 2010

A cute cartoon in the recent edition of The New Yorker shows a psychiatrist
telling a prison inmate that he has good news for him -- he's found a
syndrome for the inmate's behaviour; the implication being, of course, that he'll get him off the hook in court.
That cartoon might be good for a laugh, but it reflects what's going on in
the study of human behaviour these days. It seems that negative behaviours
are being reclassified as mental illnesses, and therefore open to treatment
with a variety of powerful drugs.
"Psychiatry should not be in the business of inadvertently manufacturing
mental disorders," says Dr. Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke
University, who headed the task force that wrote the fourth edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Enter Edition 5, which
appears to do just that.
Frances suggests the fourth edition contributed to what the public has
suspected all along -- that the reason there are suddenly so many kids with
attention deficit disorder is that normal variations of behaviour are being
pathologized, given labels and medicated.
It's not that the book itself is to blame, Frances points out, but it fuelled "a runaway fad led by thought leaders and pushed by drug companies and
advocacy groups."
Children who 30 or 40 years ago were rambunctious or fidgety were not
considered to be suffering any kind of syndrome -- they were thought to be
acting as children do. They'd grow up, and grow out of it.
Now it's to the point where, as a friend of mine who is a teacher says,
three-quarters of the children entering kindergarten at her school have been
diagnosed with some syndrome or disorder related to their behaviour, and are either on medication or in therapy for it.
How did we get to such a sorry state? Maybe the self-help movement has
helped promote this type of thinking with the cult of victimization it fostered, which let people off the hook for their bad behaviours by reclassifying them as disorders.
And now, with this fifth edition of the DSM, it's possible that a perfectly normal two-year-old's temper tantrums could be reclassified as "temper
dysregulation disorder with dysphoria."
By the time you can say that mouthful of words, the tantrum could be over.
But it's certainly enough to dysregulate your own temper to think that one
by one, normal childhood behaviours are being relabelled as abnormal.
Soon, there won't be a normal child left in the world because the range of
"normal" will have shrunk to the point that nobody will fit into such narrow parameters. Everyone will be a candidate for a diagnosis and for treatment
-- and the drug companies will be rubbing their hands in glee.
Apparently, TDD -- maybe it's a disorder in its own right to reduce everything to a trendy acronym -- could replace childhood bipolar disorder, since that syndrome has gotten way out of hand in terms of the number of cases
being diagnosed. Time to move on to something else, I guess. Temper tantrums, sure, that'll work. If your toddler throws a fit in the grocery store because he wants a cookie, soon you'll be able to hand him a pill instead.
Maybe people shouldn't be so surprised at the levels of drug use among
teenagers. It seems so many of them have been medicated for one syndrome or another since they were small children, that illicit drugs are no big deal; they're just a welcome change from the licit ones.
Two types of fallout are inevitable when every sort of negative behaviour
morphs into a pathological condition.
The first is that genuine mental illness gets trivialized. People
suffering from depression have known that for years, hence the barrage of awareness campaigns aimed at ending the stigmatization of being depressed.
The second bit of fallout feeds right into the cult of victimization -- if I'm behaving badly, it's not my fault; it's a disorder and I can't be held responsible for my actions.
The spread of that flawed reasoning should be enough to make anyone throw a temper tantrum.
nlakritz@theherald.canwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Victoria Times Colonist
http://www.timescolonist.com/health/dis ... z0mZgYmIgG

[Brain Man]

I have had some small, non-professional experience with mental illness and have for a long time thought the 'chemical imbalance in the brain' line smelled of bullshit. Mainly I thought so because anyone I know who was told this, when asked, told me that no brain samples were ever taken and tested.
So I guessed that the physician simply inferred it from the symptoms.

Another problem I have had is that the doctor will (again, limited experience talking here) prescribe for a condition (like a chemical imbalance), then when more problems occur, rather than stop medicating, will prescribe new meds based on what was wrong while the patient was taking the old (incorrect, apparently) meds. Lather, rinse, repeat for life.

I try to be cautious when I read something which agrees so firmly with me, so I ask anyone here with some experience to share what they know about this author, the premise or the subject in general. I have attached the bit I read so far, and welcome any contributions.

I havent read that lot, but can provide a lot of studies which show we all have different brain chemistries with particular genes putting some of us at risk of clinical depression. For example we all have different profiles for the Monoamine Oxidase gene that determines how up or down you are on a continuous basis throughout life. The question is whether drugs should be used to treat it. The answer is that we still in the dark ages in regards to drugs and in most cases it makes patients worse in the long term, at the expense of getting a short term boost.

Some conditions are so extreme though (extreme mania, OCD etc..) a drug therapy is often necessary in conjunction with cognitive treatment.

[orpheus]

I've lived for a long time with mental illness (bipolar disorder), and I can honestly say that drugs saved my life.

For what it's worth.

[Cunt]

I've lived for a long time with mental illness (bipolar disorder), and I can honestly say that drugs saved my life.

For what it's worth.

I appreciate your contribution, orpheus, but I was looking more broadly. You will get individuals saying (HONESTLY) that Jeebus (or another god) saved their life - that doesn't make it so.

I understand that in your particular case you saw a positive outcome, but to put it another way, how could we know what outcome would have been without those drugs?

It is encouraging to hear someone speak positively about their experience with mental illness and drug treatment though. What I want to ask is, if they were treating a 'chemical imbalance in your brain', did they take tissue or something from your brain to determine the lack? Or did they just infer (maybe correctly) about this imbalance?

[SpeedOfSound]

In 1998 I was diagnosed by a TOVA test as being off the charts ADHD. A psychologist and a medical doctor talked me, a meth addict with 13 years of sobriety, into taking Ritalin. Nine years later I finally got off the cocaine and vodka again. I also went through the bipolar and depression diagnosis in the 90's with the ensuing regimen of crazy drugs that did crazy things to me.

I was considered suicidally depressed and dangerously manic and medicated into a strange fuzzy world of low level discontent. This all led to me seeing the shrink that fucking near killed me with Ritalin.

Today I am gloriously happy. I am so ecstatic to wake up in the morning that I scare my cat with enthusiasm. I spend about three minutes a week feeling a little down. No drugs. Not a fucking one. Just crystal clear sobriety.

My mother and brother, both suffering from dementia for different reasons were being treated with anti-depressants and medication for schizophrenia. They made my mom miserable and they actually killed my brother by failing to treat the real cause of his mental illness which was simple hypertension.

I work with many addicts and alcoholics. One out of three tell me they are bipolar and have a 'dual diagnosis'. Tear in their eye they whine on about their tough old life. They they get fucked up again. Then the doctor prescribes drugs on top of the existing drugs and the cycle repeats. Some of them can't even stay out of the mental wards while they are sober.

Something is really fucking wrong with all this.

[SpeedOfSound]

All of these drugs that are being prescribed work across the entire brain. Neurotransmitters do not. They are effective in naturally wired zones. So every drug prescribed to cure a mental illness has massive side effects that we know nothing about.

For the most part we know nothing about how the drugs work. All we know is that rats move around more when we feed them the drugs. Then we test new drugs that make over-active rats move less. Presumably the rats were surviving just fine without the meds. The same is true of us. EVERYONE has a depressed or manic moment. Nothing will make it worse faster than being 'diagnosed' with a mental illness matching the symptom. Nothing will make it seem better faster than a pill that changes everything about how your brain interfaces with reality.

But if you charted the prescription patterns for all people on these drugs you would find, I'm guessing, that over 99% of them have some tinkering going on with the dose and the types of meds they are on. I bet over 50% are put on multiple drugs and I'm certain that no doctor has a clue what the combination are doing in the brain.

So what is going on? Could it have something to do with billions of dollars? Could it have something to do with a generation of hippie whiners who have too much time on their hands?

[ficklefiend]

When they say an imbalance I doubt they have come to this conclusion directly, e.g- as you suggest, cutting out a bit of the brain and testing how much of one thing or another is in it. From what I know, which isn't much, I don't think that wouldn't reflect truly the way the brain works.

Perhaps it is more likely that we have certain drugs that we think act in certain ways, we give them to certain people who have certain characteristics, and we find they react to these in certain ways.

Take notes and repeat.

Having had to sit down and go through pages and pages of pharmacology in the past few years, I have found it quite alarming how many drugs for which we have only a very vague idea of how they work or no idea at all.

[orpheus]

All of these drugs that are being prescribed work across the entire brain. Neurotransmitters do not. They are effective in naturally wired zones. So every drug prescribed to cure a mental illness has massive side effects that we know nothing about.

For the most part we know nothing about how the drugs work. All we know is that rats move around more when we feed them the drugs. Then we test new drugs that make over-active rats move less. Presumably the rats were surviving just fine without the meds. The same is true of us. EVERYONE has a depressed or manic moment. Nothing will make it worse faster than being 'diagnosed' with a mental illness matching the symptom. Nothing will make it seem better faster than a pill that changes everything about how your brain interfaces with reality.

But if you charted the prescription patterns for all people on these drugs you would find, I'm guessing, that over 99% of them have some tinkering going on with the dose and the types of meds they are on. I bet over 50% are put on multiple drugs and I'm certain that no doctor has a clue what the combination are doing in the brain.

So what is going on? Could it have something to do with billions of dollars? Could it have something to do with a generation of hippie whiners who have too much time on their hands?

It could also have to do with a science in its infancy. In fact, I think that's the most realistic.

"Whiners"? That's pretty harsh. I'm always curious as to where such hostility comes from. Have you been personally harmed by those you term "whiners"?

Also: you do know the difference between a "depressed or manic moment" that, as you say, everyone has, and the illnesses called depression and bipolar disorder. Don't you?

[Brain Man]

I understand that in your particular case you saw a positive outcome, but to put it another way, how could we know what outcome would have been without those drugs?

Psychologists have knowledge bases which allow them to make rough predictions on outcomes, as basically there is only so much variation between different brains and the disorders that affect them. Some disorders are more unpredictable, while some follow a pattern of progression thats the same in everybody affected (e.g. Schizophrenia).

So if somebody is admitted with extreme mania or delusions, they have to take some kind of action to prevent the patient harming themselves or somebody else. Very often a drug is the only thing thats going to do that within the resources available to them.

[SpeedOfSound]

All of these drugs that are being prescribed work across the entire brain. Neurotransmitters do not. They are effective in naturally wired zones. So every drug prescribed to cure a mental illness has massive side effects that we know nothing about.

For the most part we know nothing about how the drugs work. All we know is that rats move around more when we feed them the drugs. Then we test new drugs that make over-active rats move less. Presumably the rats were surviving just fine without the meds. The same is true of us. EVERYONE has a depressed or manic moment. Nothing will make it worse faster than being 'diagnosed' with a mental illness matching the symptom. Nothing will make it seem better faster than a pill that changes everything about how your brain interfaces with reality.

But if you charted the prescription patterns for all people on these drugs you would find, I'm guessing, that over 99% of them have some tinkering going on with the dose and the types of meds they are on. I bet over 50% are put on multiple drugs and I'm certain that no doctor has a clue what the combination are doing in the brain.

So what is going on? Could it have something to do with billions of dollars? Could it have something to do with a generation of hippie whiners who have too much time on their hands?

It could also have to do with a science in its infancy. In fact, I think that's the most realistic.

"Whiners"? That's pretty harsh. I'm always curious as to where such hostility comes from. Have you been personally harmed by those you term "whiners"?

Also: you do know the difference between a "depressed or manic moment" that, as you say, everyone has, and the illnesses called depression and bipolar disorder. Don't you?

I am the whiner that I have such hostility for. I'm talking about me. I had real mania problems in my forties but I had been on various anti-depressants before it happened so I'm not certain where it came from. On one stunning occasion I drove onto someone's lawn instead of in their driveway. I started to do strange erratic things while extremely happy. Then a depression would hit me like a wall and I couldn't put words together unless I talked very slowly.

In my teens I had manic episodes and much depression. I also had visual hallucinations. So I have no doubt about there being something 'wrong' with my mind. The point is that the meds didn't help. They only changed me and change felt like help. The real help was had by changing troubling aspects of my life and my personality. In short I grew up. I think my IQ and ensuing drug addiction caused most of my trouble. The meds worked just like the drugs. They just made it all continue and continually change.

[Brain Man]

All of these drugs that are being prescribed work across the entire brain. Neurotransmitters do not. They are effective in naturally wired zones. So every drug prescribed to cure a mental illness has massive side effects that we know nothing about.

Thats the big problem facing neuroscientists today. How to be target specific. They are working on it seriously though. i.e. By breaking down receptor subtypes in more detail, figuring out which subtypes cluster with receptor subtypes of another common receptor in a particular brain area. Then have the drug activate only in the presence of these combinations to that region. So its a form of brain mapping. They even go so far as to recruit poisons from seafish for example, to figure out how to trace all this as these are receptor subtype specific. Of course everybody has different metabolism of neurotransmitters, and sensitivities, so they have to work on that as well by logging the main genetic groups we fall under.

Expect a whole new class of recreational or other drugs to come out of all this stuff. e,g, a spinoff will be drugs that can target and stimulate the maths, musical or any particular regions or combination of regions in the brain

[orpheus]

All of these drugs that are being prescribed work across the entire brain. Neurotransmitters do not. They are effective in naturally wired zones. So every drug prescribed to cure a mental illness has massive side effects that we know nothing about.

For the most part we know nothing about how the drugs work. All we know is that rats move around more when we feed them the drugs. Then we test new drugs that make over-active rats move less. Presumably the rats were surviving just fine without the meds. The same is true of us. EVERYONE has a depressed or manic moment. Nothing will make it worse faster than being 'diagnosed' with a mental illness matching the symptom. Nothing will make it seem better faster than a pill that changes everything about how your brain interfaces with reality.

But if you charted the prescription patterns for all people on these drugs you would find, I'm guessing, that over 99% of them have some tinkering going on with the dose and the types of meds they are on. I bet over 50% are put on multiple drugs and I'm certain that no doctor has a clue what the combination are doing in the brain.

So what is going on? Could it have something to do with billions of dollars? Could it have something to do with a generation of hippie whiners who have too much time on their hands?

It could also have to do with a science in its infancy. In fact, I think that's the most realistic.

"Whiners"? That's pretty harsh. I'm always curious as to where such hostility comes from. Have you been personally harmed by those you term "whiners"?

Also: you do know the difference between a "depressed or manic moment" that, as you say, everyone has, and the illnesses called depression and bipolar disorder. Don't you?

I am the whiner that I have such hostility for. I'm talking about me. I had real mania problems in my forties but I had been on various anti-depressants before it happened so I'm not certain where it came from. On one stunning occasion I drove onto someone's lawn instead of in their driveway. I started to do strange erratic things while extremely happy. Then a depression would hit me like a wall and I couldn't put words together unless I talked very slowly.

In my teens I had manic episodes and much depression. I also had visual hallucinations. So I have no doubt about there being something 'wrong' with my mind. The point is that the meds didn't help. They only changed me and change felt like help. The real help was had by changing troubling aspects of my life and my personality. In short I grew up. I think my IQ and ensuing drug addiction caused most of my trouble. The meds worked just like the drugs. They just made it all continue and continually change.

I'm sorry to hear you had such a rough time for so long - and I'm truly glad you've been able to change. Sorry if I got hostile in turn; it's a sensitive topic for me.

All I can say is that for me, the meds did a HUGE amount to help me.

[Brain Man]

In my teens I had manic episodes and much depression. I also had visual hallucinations. So I have no doubt about there being something 'wrong' with my mind. The point is that the meds didn't help. They only changed me and change felt like help. The real help was had by changing troubling aspects of my life and my personality. In short I grew up. I think my IQ and ensuing drug addiction caused most of my trouble. The meds worked just like the drugs. They just made it all continue and continually change.

Sounds like shades of schizoid spectrum in there, with hallucinations coming on at puberty. you know the genes for bipolar and schizoid spectrum are strongly linked ? In late teens neuron pruning starts and thats why most schizophrenia hits then as schizophrenia is a massive extension of neuron pruning.

[Friday]

Been on the 'Zac in past times...

It seems that psychiatrists need to learn the same lessons about over-prescription, as doctors learned about antibiotics.