razz
6-8-14, 10:58am
Thought that you might find this article interesting if you have not heard of the book before as I had not. Think of the billions of dollars that have been wasted on prescription drug spending that did harm to the patient!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/antidepressant-drugs-may-not-be-best-treatment-robert-whitaker-1.2667410
Quotes:
For the past 25 years, people suffering from depression have been treated with antidepressant drugs like Zoloft, Prozac and Paxil — three of the world’s best-selling selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. But people are questioning whether these drugs are the appropriate treatment for depression, and if they could even be causing harm.
The drugs are designed to address a chemical imbalance in the brain and thereby relieve the symptoms of depression. In this case, it’s a shortage of serotonin that antidepressants work to correct...
“If you dig into the science behind it,” Whitaker told Michael Enright, host of The Sunday Edition on CBC Radio, “you’ll find out that it’s not true, and that this was a hypothesis that arose in the 1960s, that depression was due to low serotonin, and that it was investigated and found not to be true by the early 1980s. And there was subsequent research to see if this was so, and it never panned out...
And as early as 1998, the American Psychiatric Association in its textbook says we’re not finding that people with depression have any abnormality in their serotonin, but because it’s such an effective metaphor for getting people to take the drugs and sell the drugs, it’s continued to be promoted.”...
In fact, Ronald Pies, a psychiatrist and the former editor of The Psychiatric Times, refers to the chemical imbalance hypothesis as an “urban legend” that well-informed psychiatrists never bought into.
Whitaker says that when Anatomy of an Epidemic came out, the controversy wasn’t so much over his debunking of the chemical imbalance hypothesis. It was over his finding that people who took psychiatric drugs were more likely to exhibit symptoms five years after being diagnosed than those who did not take the drugs.
But Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health in the U.S., has weighed in on antipsychotic drugs and reached a conclusion that echoes Whitaker’s: That antipsychotic drugs impede long-term recovery rates
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/antidepressant-drugs-may-not-be-best-treatment-robert-whitaker-1.2667410
Quotes:
For the past 25 years, people suffering from depression have been treated with antidepressant drugs like Zoloft, Prozac and Paxil — three of the world’s best-selling selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. But people are questioning whether these drugs are the appropriate treatment for depression, and if they could even be causing harm.
The drugs are designed to address a chemical imbalance in the brain and thereby relieve the symptoms of depression. In this case, it’s a shortage of serotonin that antidepressants work to correct...
“If you dig into the science behind it,” Whitaker told Michael Enright, host of The Sunday Edition on CBC Radio, “you’ll find out that it’s not true, and that this was a hypothesis that arose in the 1960s, that depression was due to low serotonin, and that it was investigated and found not to be true by the early 1980s. And there was subsequent research to see if this was so, and it never panned out...
And as early as 1998, the American Psychiatric Association in its textbook says we’re not finding that people with depression have any abnormality in their serotonin, but because it’s such an effective metaphor for getting people to take the drugs and sell the drugs, it’s continued to be promoted.”...
In fact, Ronald Pies, a psychiatrist and the former editor of The Psychiatric Times, refers to the chemical imbalance hypothesis as an “urban legend” that well-informed psychiatrists never bought into.
Whitaker says that when Anatomy of an Epidemic came out, the controversy wasn’t so much over his debunking of the chemical imbalance hypothesis. It was over his finding that people who took psychiatric drugs were more likely to exhibit symptoms five years after being diagnosed than those who did not take the drugs.
But Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health in the U.S., has weighed in on antipsychotic drugs and reached a conclusion that echoes Whitaker’s: That antipsychotic drugs impede long-term recovery rates