Antipsychotics

Here’s an interesting story from Australia, recently back in the spotlight. From 1962 to 1979, psychiatrist Harry Bailey, MD, serving as chief psychiatrist at Chelmsford Private Hospital in New South Wales, practiced “deep sleep therapy”, which involved keeping people in barbiturate-induced comas for days or even weeks. Twenty-four of the individuals who received this “treatment” died while still in the hospital. Many more died or showed permanent brain damage after discharge. ...

Actress Carrie Fisher died on December 27, 2016, at the early age of 60. In a 2001 article on Healthy Place, she was described as “Perhaps one of manic-depression’s best-known champions…” Here’s another quote from the same article: "I'm fine, but I'm bipolar. I'm on seven medications, and I take medication three times a day. This constantly puts me in touch with the illness I have. I'm never quite allowed to be free of that for a day. It's like being a diabetic." ...

On February 1, Allen Frances, MD, published an interesting article on the Huffington Post blog. The article is called Do Antipsychotics Help or Harm Psychotic Symptoms?, and is a response to Robert Whitaker’s post of January 27: “Me, Allen Frances, and Climbing Out of a Pigeonhole. This post, in turn, was a response to Dr. Frances’s Psychiatric Medicines Are Not All Good or All Bad, which was published in the Huffington Post on January 15. Readers may remember that I published a critique of this latter article on February 9. ...

BACKGROUND On June 19, 2015, I published a post titled Allen Frances’ Ties to Johnson & Johnson. In that post, I set out some very serious allegations against Dr. Frances. I drew these allegations from a document titled Special Witness Report dated October 15, 2010. The report was written by David Rothman, PhD, Professor of Social Medicine at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Rothman’s report was produced in the context of a lawsuit filed by the State of Texas against Janssen Pharmaceutica, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. ...

INTRODUCTION I recently came across an article titled Diagnosisgate: Conflict of Interest at the Top of the Psychiatric Apparatus, by Paula Caplan, PhD. The article was published in Aporia, the University of Ottawa nursing journal, in January 2015. Aporia is “a peer-reviewed, bilingual, and open access journal dedicated to scholarly debates in nursing and the health sciences.” Dr, Caplan is a clinical and research psychologist, and an Associate at Harvard’s DuBois Institute. She worked as a consultant to the DSM-IV task force in the 1980’s, but resigned from this position after two years. Here’s a quote from her February 2014 post on Mad in America The Great “Crazy” Cover-up: Harm Results from Rewriting the History of DSM: ...

In November of last year, the Schizophrenia Bulletin published online a research study: Antipsychotic Treatment and Mortality in Schizophrenia, by Minna Torniainen et al. The research was conducted in Sweden. The authors offer the following background for the study: "It is generally believed that long-term use of antipsychotics increases mortality and, especially, the risk of cardiovascular death. However, there are no solid data to substantiate this view." and the following conclusions: "Among patients with schizophrenia, the cumulative antipsychotic exposure displays a U-shaped curve for overall mortality, revealing the highest risk of death among those patients with no antipsychotic use. These results indicate that both excess overall and cardiovascular mortality in schizophrenia is attributable to other factors than antipsychotic treatment when used in adequate dosages." ...

It's no secret that here in America, foster children are being prescribed psychiatric drugs, especially neuroleptics, as a means of controlling their behavior. A great deal has been said and written on the matter. Politicians have declared the practice deplorable. Children's advocacy groups have expressed concern, and, of course, those of us in the antipsychiatry movement have screamed till we're hoarse. But the problem persists. For the past six months or so, the San Jose Mercury News, a California newspaper, has been running frequent articles on this topic, calling for oversight and corrective action. ...

Thomas Insel, MD, is the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health. In June of last year, he published, on the Director’s Blog, an article titled Are Children Overmedicated? The gist of the article is that children are not being overmedicated, but rather that there is an increase in “severe psychiatric problems” in this population. Here are some quotes, interspersed with my comments. "The latest estimate from the National Center for Health Statistics reports that 7.5 percent of U.S. children between ages 6 and 17 were taking medication for 'emotional or behavioral difficulties' in 2011-2012. The CDC reports a five-fold increase in the number of children under 18 on psychostimulants from 1988-1994 to 2007–2010, with the most recent rate of 4.2 percent. The same report estimates that 1.3 percent of children are on antidepressants. The rate of antipsychotic prescriptions for children has increased six-fold over this same period, according to a study of office visits within the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. In children under age 5, psychotropic prescription rates peaked at 1.45 percent in 2002-2005 and declined to 1.00 percent from 2006-2009." ...

There’s an interesting February 11, 2014, article on Peter Breggin’s website: $1.5 Million Award in Child Tardive Dyskinesia Malpractice. Thanks to Mad in America for the link. Here’s the opening paragraph: "On February 11, 2014 a Chicago jury awarded $1.5 million to an autistic child who developed a severe case of tardive dyskinesia and tardive akathisia while being treated by psychiatrists with Risperdal and then Zyprexa between 2002 and 2007. The drug-induced disorder was diagnosed when he was fifteen years old and by then had become disabling and irreversible." ...

I recently read The NIMH-CATIE Schizophrenia Study: What Did We Learn? by Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, and T. Scott Stroup, MD, MPH. The article was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry 168:8, August 2011. Here are two quotes: "When the CATIE study was designed in 1999-2000, the prevailing opinion of researchers and clinicians alike was that the newer (second-generation) antipsychotic drugs were vastly superior to the older (first-generation) antipsychotic drugs in efficacy and safety. This largely reflected the results of studies sponsored by the manufacturers of the new drugs…, marketing messages of pharmaceutical companies and the hopes of many who wanted better treatments." ...