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Whitaker, 2016 The case against psychiatric drugs


dalsaan

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This is an article by Robert Whitaker recently published in the Brazillian Journal of Mental Health

 

Source:  Cadernos Brasileiros de Saúde Mental/ Brazilian Journal of Mental Health ISSN 1984-2147, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil.

 

Title:  The case against psychiatric drugs

 

Author:  Robert Whitaker

 

Link - https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/cbsm/article/view/69290/41591  (can access a full text PDF via this link)

 

Abstract

 

ABSTRACT The conventional narrative in psychiatry tells of a psychopharmacological revolution that began with the arrival of chlorpromazine in asylum medicine in 1955. Today, psychiatric drugs are understood to be safe and effective treatments for a variety of disorders. However, a close review of the scientific literature, stretching over a span of 50 years, reveals a paradox: medications that are effective over the short term may increase the chronicity of a disorder over the long-term. A case study of antipsychotics best illustrates this paradox. The small number of researchers investigating this paradox are focusing on drug induced “oppositional tolerance” as an explanation for the poor long-term outcomes of medicated patients.

Edited by Shep
fixed broken link

Please note - I am not a medical practitioner and I do not give medical advice. I offer an opinion based on my own experiences, reading and discussion with others.On Effexor for 2 months at the start of 2005. Had extreme insomnia as an adverse reaction. Changed to mirtazapine. Have been trying to get off since mid 2008 with numerous failures including CTs and slow (but not slow enough tapers)Have slow tapered at 10 per cent or less for years. I have liquid mirtazapine made at a compounding chemist.

Was on 1.6 ml as at 19 March 2014.

Dropped to 1.5 ml 7 June 2014. Dropped to 1.4 in about September.

Dropped to 1.3 on 20 December 2014. Dropped to 1.2 in mid Jan 2015.

Dropped to 1 ml in late Feb 2015. I think my old medication had run out of puff so I tried 1ml when I got the new stuff and it seems to be going ok. Sleep has been good over the last week (as of 13/3/15).

Dropped to 1/2 ml 14/11/15 Fatigue still there as are memory and cognition problems. Sleep is patchy but liveable compared to what it has been in the past.

 

DRUG FREE - as at 1st May 2017

 

>My intro post is here - http://survivingantidepressants.org/index.php?/topic/2250-dalsaan

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Great find dalsaan.

Thanks for posting.

Wonder if this has been published in an English Journal as well.

I think a miracle has happened ....i seem to be able to understand Portuguese!

Thought for the day: Lets stand up, and let’s speak out , together. G Olsen

We have until the 14th. Feb 2018. 

URGENT REQUEST Please consider submitting  for the petition on Prescribed Drug Dependence and Withdrawal currently awaiting its third consideration at the Scottish Parliament. You don't even have to be from Scotland. By clicking on the link below you can read some of the previous submissions but be warned many of them are quite harrowing.

http://www.parliament.scot/GettingInvolved/Petitions/PE01651   

Please tell them about your problems taking and withdrawing from antidepressants and/or benzos.

Send by email to petitions@parliament.scot and quote PE01651 in the subject heading. Keep to a maximum of 3 sides of A4 and you can't name for legal reasons any doctor you have consulted. Tell them if you wish to remain anonymous. We need the numbers to help convince the committee members we are not isolated cases. You have until mid February. Thank you

Recovering paxil addict

None of the published articles shed light on what ssri's ... actually do or what their hazards might be. Healy 2013. 

This is so true, with anything you get on these drugs, dependance, tapering, withdrawal symptoms, side effects, just silent. And if there is something mentioned then their is a serious disconnect between what is said and reality! 

  "Every time I read of a multi-person shooting, I always presume that person had just started a SSRI or had just stopped."  Dr Mosher. Me too! 

Over two decades later, the number of antidepressant prescriptions a year is slightly more than the number of people in the Western world. Most (nine out of 10) prescriptions are for patients who faced difficulties on stopping, equating to about a tenth of the population. These patients are often advised to continue treatment because their difficulties indicate they need ongoing treatment, just as a person with diabetes needs insulin. Healy 2015

I believe the ssri era will soon stand as one of the most shameful in the history of medicine. Healy 2015

Let people help people ... in a natural, kind, non-addictive (and non-big pharma) way. J Broadley 2017

 

 

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In 1987, the year that Prozac was approved for marketing, there were 1.25 million adults in the United States receiving an SSI or SSDI payment due to a mental disorder. This produced a disability rate of 543 per 100,000 people. Since that time, the number of adults on government disability due to a mental disorder has risen to more than 4.5 million in 2014, a disability rate of 1,408 per 100,000.
Thus, during the Prozac era, the disability rate has nearly tripled in the United States.

The same sharp rise in disability due to mental disorders has occurred in country after country that has adopted widespread use of psychiatric drugs. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United Kingdom, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and numerous other countries have reported similar sharp rises in disability due to mental disorders.

 

All of which raises a question, which is the focus of this paper: Do these drugs help people stay well, or, for some paradoxical reason, do they worsen long-term outcomes and thus increase the risk that a person suffering from a psychiatric disorder will end up disabled by it?

pg 3

 

But this is not the end of this scientific story. Research into the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders did bear fruit in one way: it helped flesh out an understanding of how the brain is changed by a psychiatric drug. And what the researchers found is that a psychiatric drug, in essence, creates the very chemical imbalance hypothesized to cause the disorder in the first place.

p5

 

Prior to the antidepressant era, depression was understood to be an episodic disorder. But once antidepressants began to be commonly used, at least a few psychiatrists began to worry that the drugs were causing a “chronification” of the disease, and numerous studies have since found that depression runs a much more chronic course today than it did before the advent of the drugs. In addition, long-term studies conducted during the past 20 years have regularly found that the unmedicated patients have better outcomes. These findings have led to the worry, first expressed by Giovanni Fava in 1994, that antidepressants induce a biological change in the brain that increases a person’s biological vulnerability to depression.

 

In a review of this question, Rif El-Mallakh, an expert in mood disorders from the University of Louisville School of Medicine, concluded that SSRI antidepressantscould induce a chronic depressive state he called tardive dysphoria. “Continued drug treatment may induce processes that are the opposite of what the medication originally produced,” he wrote. This may “cause a worsening of the illness, continue for a period of time after discontinuation of the medicine, and may not be reversible.”

This problem of oppositional toleranceis likely a universal one with longterm use of psychiatric drugs. The drugs induce compensatory adaptations in the brain that are the opposite of theirintended effect. Long-term outcome studies of other psychiatric disorders provide additional reason to worry that this might be so. Over the long-term, benzodiazepine users are likely to experience an increase in anxiety symptoms. Long-term outcomes for bipolar patients have notably deteriorated in the last forty years. Studies of stimulants as a treatment for ADHD have failed to find that the treatment provides a long-term benefit

p14-15

 

nz11

Thought for the day: Lets stand up, and let’s speak out , together. G Olsen

We have until the 14th. Feb 2018. 

URGENT REQUEST Please consider submitting  for the petition on Prescribed Drug Dependence and Withdrawal currently awaiting its third consideration at the Scottish Parliament. You don't even have to be from Scotland. By clicking on the link below you can read some of the previous submissions but be warned many of them are quite harrowing.

http://www.parliament.scot/GettingInvolved/Petitions/PE01651   

Please tell them about your problems taking and withdrawing from antidepressants and/or benzos.

Send by email to petitions@parliament.scot and quote PE01651 in the subject heading. Keep to a maximum of 3 sides of A4 and you can't name for legal reasons any doctor you have consulted. Tell them if you wish to remain anonymous. We need the numbers to help convince the committee members we are not isolated cases. You have until mid February. Thank you

Recovering paxil addict

None of the published articles shed light on what ssri's ... actually do or what their hazards might be. Healy 2013. 

This is so true, with anything you get on these drugs, dependance, tapering, withdrawal symptoms, side effects, just silent. And if there is something mentioned then their is a serious disconnect between what is said and reality! 

  "Every time I read of a multi-person shooting, I always presume that person had just started a SSRI or had just stopped."  Dr Mosher. Me too! 

Over two decades later, the number of antidepressant prescriptions a year is slightly more than the number of people in the Western world. Most (nine out of 10) prescriptions are for patients who faced difficulties on stopping, equating to about a tenth of the population. These patients are often advised to continue treatment because their difficulties indicate they need ongoing treatment, just as a person with diabetes needs insulin. Healy 2015

I believe the ssri era will soon stand as one of the most shameful in the history of medicine. Healy 2015

Let people help people ... in a natural, kind, non-addictive (and non-big pharma) way. J Broadley 2017

 

 

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