Neuroleptics

It is a central theme of this website that psychiatry has done, and continues to do, a great deal of damage to people it claims to help. In my opinion, the damage done by neuroleptic drugs is among the most severe. The increasing use of these products ought to be a huge cause for concern. This is particularly true in that these very toxic drugs are being administered with increasing frequency to children – even to children as young as two years old! ...

BACKGROUND Mad in America ran an article (Reduction/Discontinuation of Antipsychotics Produces Higher Long-Term Recovery) on July 3, describing a piece of research on this topic which had been done in Holland. The original article, by Lex Wunderink, MD PhD et al, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry (JAMA-P). You can see an abstract of the article here, but the full text is behind a pay wall. ...

Joanna Moncrieff, MD, has an article up on Mad in America. It’s called Antipsychotics and Brain Shrinkage: An Update, and is dated June 19. Joanna Moncrieff is the author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure, a widely-read book which challenges the entire concept of mental illness. In the book Dr. Moncrieff also makes the point that the brain shrinkage associated with a “diagnosis” of “schizophrenia” is in fact caused by the neuroleptic drugs, and is not, as psychiatrists claim, a consequence of the so-called illness. ...

Earlier this year, The American Society of Consultant Pharmacists published a report on the use of neuroleptic drugs in nursing homes. According to this report, 25% of nursing home residents receive neuroleptic drugs. In general, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) consider these prescriptions appropriate only if the recipient is psychotic. (Obviously we could discuss this at length, but let’s set that issue aside for now.) What CMS considers entirely inappropriate, however, is prescribing these products to residents with dementia as a way of controlling “difficult” behaviors such as wandering, being abusive, or resisting care. ...

Melissa, a commenter on a recent post, asked if I would do a post on akathisia. Akathisia literally means inability to sit. People with this problem typically pace for long periods, and if they do sit down, they continue to keep moving and shifting their position in the chair. In severity it can range from a generalized sense of uneasiness or agitation, to severe discomfort and even pain. The discomfort tends to be located in the legs, but can also occur in the hip and pelvic area. In severe cases, the victims pace to the point of exhaustion, but even then sitting does not relieve the discomfort. ...

Courtesy of yobluemama2 on Twitter, I’ve come across an interesting article. It’s called Psychiatric Drugs and Suicide, by Janne Larsson, a reporter. It’s posted on PsychRights.org, a law project for psychiatric rights. The article focuses on suicides committed in Sweden in 2006-2007, and the proportions of victims who had taken psychiatric drugs in the period prior to the suicide. The study also covers data from autopsy reports. Information for the study was gathered under Sweden’s freedom of information act. Here’s a summary of the main findings. ...

Of all the evils perpetrated by American psychiatry in the past 60 years, the administration of neuroleptic drugs to children is arguably the worst. And it is a practice that is growing each year. The essential purpose of these drugs is to make people more docile and more easily managed by destroying brain tissue. The side effects are devastating. Recently Gabrielle Carson, MD, a psychiatrist at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, wrote a paper on The Dramatic Rise in Neuroleptic Use In Children: Why Do We Do It and What Does It Buy Us? You can see Dr. Carlson’s commentary here. (Thanks to yobluemama2 on Twitter for flagging the article.) ...

There’s an interesting article on Vermont’s Seven Days. It’s called Burlington’s HowardCenter Tries a New Approach to Treating Mental Illness: More Talk, Fewer Meds. You can see it here. (Thanks to Steven Coles on Twitter for the link.) Apparently Vermont’s Department of Mental Health is promoting a “new” kind of treatment for psychosis: talk therapy. The project leader is Dr. Sandra Steingard, who for most of her career accepted the orthodox view of schizophrenia and the need for neuroleptic drugs. ...

There’s an important article (here) on Monica Cassani’s website BeyondMeds in which she tackles the myth that once a person has been assigned a “diagnosis” of schizophrenia, he/she must take neuroleptics for life. Here’s a quote: "Unfortunately, at this juncture in history many people who get labeled with psychiatric illness these days do not have the opportunity for recovery because they are encouraged to stay ill by a system that all too often impedes psychological growth by use of excessive psychotropic drugs. This over-use of medication also kills people. The average life-span of people taking these medications is 25 years shorter than people who do not take these drugs. The drugs cause a long laundry list of problems only some of which are diabetes, obesity, heart conditions and a shrinking brain." ...

We’ve all known for a long time that neuroleptic drugs damage brain cells. But now it seems clear that they also increase the risk of osteoporosis and consequently bone fractures. There’s an article about this in the International Journal of Endocrinology, dated March 2013. It’s titled Osteoporosis Associated with Antipsychotic Treatment in Schizophrenia, and was written by Haishan Wu et al, from the Central South University in Changsha, China. I came upon the article through Robert Whitaker’s site Mad in America. ...