Medication Madness

Thailand featured in the news yesterday when a Thai soldier ran amok in a shopping mall and started shooting, killing twenty people and injuring many more. I was interested in trying to discover if he had taken any medication recently for depression or anxiety. So far I've not been able to find any information to confirm this but my search did throw up this interesting news about ketamine and its recently approved use as an antidepressant. This post is about antidepressants and other mood-altering drugs so I've included it below:

I reason I'm looking into these types of drugs is that I'm currently reading a book by Dr. Peter Breggin called MEDICATION MADNESS: A PSYCHIATRIST EXPOSES THE DANGERS OF MOOD-ALTERING MEDICATIONS. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: front cover of Medication Madness

In the passage I'm going to quote below, Dr. Breggin describes his thoughts about why bipolar diagnoses have soared in recent years:

WHAT’S THE CAUSE OF THE INCREASED RATES of severe cases of mania? Antidepressant medications, and to a lesser extent stimulants and tranquilisers, especially Xanax, are causing the upsurge of manic episodes. In almost all the adult cases that I have evaluated in the last decade, and in every child and teenage case I have seen in my office, the manic symptoms had begun after starting antidepressants and, more occasionally, stimulants or Xanax. 

In the cases in this book, none of the children and their parents, and none of the adults who were driven into mania by prescription drugs, was told by the treating doctors that he or she had a medication-induced disorder. When occasionally the drug was implicated in any way, it was portrayed as a benign agent that happened to “unmask” a preexisting, underlying bipolar disorder—a theory based not on science but on the physician’s impulse to avoid blame for the disaster. 

The two men mentioned earlier in this chapter, and many others in stories to come, fit nicely into the official DSM criteria for a diagnosis of manic episode with one big exception—their reactions were drug-induced. According to the official diagnostic manual, when a drug causes a manic-like episode, it is improper to make a diagnosis of manic episode or bipolar disorder. As emphasised earlier, when a drug is the suspected cause of manic-like symptoms, the proper diagnosis is substance-induced mood disorder. 

Unfortunately, this common sense and officially approved diagnostic standard is largely ignored in the practice of psychiatry. In almost every case I have evaluated, and perhaps every case in this book, the substance-induced mood disorder has been mistakenly diagnosed as bipolar disorder, laying the blame on the patient’s “mental illness” rather than on the doctor’s prescription. Like the proverbial elephant in the living room, the drug’s obvious role in producing the mania will go unmentioned in the medical record. 

It is very prejudicial to the patient to be labeled with bipolar disorder rather than with a substance-induced mood disorder. A diagnosis of bipolar disorder stigmatises the victim for life as suffering from a serious and potentially recurrent “mental illness” or “psychiatric disorder.” Without any scientific basis, the diagnosis is used to push lifetime medication, and in criminal cases, it becomes a justification for lengthy incarcerations in institutions for the criminally insane. The bipolar diagnosis makes it more difficult or impossible to get health insurance or long-term care insurance. 

In contrast, a proper diagnosis of substance-induced mood disorder identifies an acute neurological disorder that typically goes away after the medication is discontinued. Instead of lifetime medication, the proper diagnosis discourages further use of the offending drug. None of the dozens of individuals described in this book went on to repeat their criminal or dangerous behaviours after they were removed from the drugs.

This psychiatric approach is certainly the case for a person I know quite well who at age 37 was diagnosed as schizophrenic following his first psychotic episode. The fact that he had been drinking heavily for some time, smoking marijuana and taking (or possibly not taking) antidepressant medication prior this episode was ignored. He has remained on psychotropic medication to this day and firmly believes he is a schizophrenic. However, having worked as a psychiatric nurse for eight years and being familiar with schizophrenic behaviour, I know the diagnosis was unjustified. The long-term side-effects of the psychotropic medication have caused glaucoma and osteoporosis in this person (these possible side-effects are listed on the label of the medication he takes).

It may be of interest to recount how I stumbled upon Dr. Breggin. It was via an article on the Truthsteam Media website run by Aaron and Melissa Dykes. The article was titled "Then They Came For Your Mind: The Untold Story of Psychosurgery" and is accompanied by the following video:

It was a riveting video and so I was prompted to find out more about him. He has a YouTube channel and has written many books and published many scientific articles.

"Medication Madness" makes for disturbing reading as the unintended effects of antidepressants, hypnotics and tranquillisers becomes apparent. Statistics such as three million Australians using antidepressants defies belief (source):

Three million Australians are now reliant on antidepressants.

24/04/2019 

New data from the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme shows one in every eight Australians are using the drugs, including 100,000 children. 

The data has prompted concerns Australia is over-diagnosing and over-treating depression. 

Psychiatrist Dr Jon Jureidini, from the University of Adelaide, tells Ben Fordham too many doctors are prescribing the drug. 

“The marketing of antidepressants has been extremely successful, and lots of people have been led to believe they’re better off taking the drugs. 

“The safety of these drugs is often overestimated, the risks are underestimated.”

The figure of 100,000 children on antidepressants is disturbing but there are probably more children on stimulant drugs for ADHD. It's a mad, mad world when children are assaulted from an early age with vaccines, the water they drink is poisoned by fluoridation and they are zombified with medications.

A further interesting point in "Medication Madness" is the following:

Up to 10 percent of the population have a genetic lack of liver enzymes necessary for the effective breakdown of many medications, including the newer antidepressant drugs such as Prozac. These people are called “poor metabolisers.” They are more likely to suffer adverse drug reactions because the drug concentration builds up in the bloodstream when it cannot be destroyed or eliminated efficiently. If medicine were conducted on a more rational basis, all patients would be tested when possible in advance of taking psychiatric drugs—or any drugs—where there is a risk of abnormal liver metabolism affecting the treatment result. The drug companies have been reluctant to recognise this problem or to make laboratories available to perform tests for these liver enzymes. 

 I'll finish this post with another quote from the book which pretty much sums up everthing:

Meanwhile, it should be no surprise that the brain is not well suited to receive drugs. It lives in a delicate harmony with itself, an organ with complexity far beyond our current understanding and imagination that provides the biological basis of our humanity. It contains approximately one hundred billion neurones—nerve cells that send the chemical messages that run our brains and influence our bodies. There are more neurones in our brain than there are stars in the universe. Some of these individual neurones make ten thousand or more individual connections with other neurones. These neurones and their connections are ignited by a couple of hundred different neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine. The neurotransmitters we know best we nonetheless know little about; most of the others we know nothing about and haven’t even as yet identified. 

Beyond the neurotransmitters, our brain functions are affected by assorted other kinds of support cells, many chemicals such as sodium and potassium, and various hormones. The overall brain activity generates electrical fields that reflect and influence brain function in ways no one can yet grasp. We don’t even understand the operating system of the brain—how it organises and runs itself.

Each brain is more complex than the entire physical universe of stars, galaxies, black holes, gravity, and electromagnetic fields. That is the nature of life and especially of the mammalian brain—it is complex far beyond our current understanding and far beyond anything in the inanimate physical universe. 

So the next time some “expert” tries to explain a subtle manifestation of human behaviour in terms of brain function—or tries to convince you that a biochemical imbalance is at the root of your problems—you should wonder about his pecuniary motives. You should suspect that it’s in the expert’s interest to convince you that you’re a much simpler biological organism than you are. 

A principle to remember: Tampering with the human brain to influence human emotions and actions is not a good idea.the