Psychiatric drugs

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"From 1987 until the present, we saw an increase in the number of mentally disabled people from 3.3 million people to 5.7 million people in the United States. In that time, our spending on psychiatric drugs increased to an amazing degree. Combined spending on antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants jumped from around $500 million in 1986 to nearly $20 billion in 2004. So we raise the question: Is the use of these drugs somehow actually fueling this increase in the number of the disabled mentally ill?

When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of outcomes with all these drugs -- you see it with the antipsychotics, the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin used to treat ADHD. All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks. An antidepressant may ameliorate the symptoms of depression better than a placebo over the short term.

What you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients. So even on the target symptoms, there's greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms. And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself."

Read the entire interview

(Ganked with thanks from this post on alobar's Lj.)

Comments

[catskillmarina.livejournal.com]

When my mother died i was lucky that my wife (we are both female bodied)
told me to leave the corporate job that was killing me. We went to the mountains
and lived there for several wonderfull years.

Unfortunatly we had to leave those hills to go back to work. Again i want to
return to the mountains. Corporate life can be soul numbing. At my job it used
to be a custom to name servers after psych drugs - which tells a long sad story.

-- Catskillmarina

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

That was a good thing to do, to go to the mountains - I hope you will get to return to them.

I could stand maybe a month of corporate life before I was ready to gnaw my own foot off in order to escape from it. Seriously, I'd rather live in a box under a bridge and play pennywhistle for quarters than be in that kind of life - heh, not that they'd hire the likes of me anyway. So you have my fullest sympathy; it must be awfully hard.