Carl Elliot has an interesting post up about the possible link between the military’s increased use of psychotropic drugs and the concomitant increase in soldiers’ suicide rates. It’s titled Note to New York Times reporters: Read the New York Times.
Here’s a quote:
“Like many reporters before them, James Dao and Andrew Lehren, [NY Times reporters], report that suicides in the military have risen to record levels. What they don’t mention is the fact that prescriptions of psychotropic drugs, many of them with black box warnings for suicide, have also risen to record levels.”
It’s a short article, and I encourage you to take a look. Also take a look at The Military’s Billion Dollar-Pill Problem, by Paul John Scott.
As I’ve said many times, psychiatry is based on spurious concepts, and promotes damaging and destructive practices. Up until now, they’ve been able to spin the damage fairly successfully by blaming the victims and the so-called “disease process.”
But the outcry over the recent surge in suicides and violence among people taking psychotropic drugs, including soldiers, is simply not going away despite psychiatry’s and pharmaceutical companies’ best efforts in this direction. (The most compelling writing on this topic that I’ve come across is Chapter 4 of Joseph Glenmullen’s book Prozac Backlash, published in 2000. He cites references on this topic back as far as 1990! And Dr. Glenmullen is a psychiatrist!)
And the outcry is not going away, because families of victims are speaking out clearly, and are using the Internet to spread the word.
Sooner or later this issue is going to hit the fan, and when it does, you will see a rush for the lifeboats that will make the present DSM conflict look like a Sunday picnic.
The only question is: how many more people have to die?
Pharmaceutical psychiatry is not something good that needs a few minor corrections. On the contrary, it is something flawed and destructive – a wrong turning in human history – that needs to be challenged and denounced. The routine medicalization and drugging of virtually every conceivable human problem is arguably one of the most destructive forces in America today.