People who have been harmed by psychiatric medication blame the doctors who started them on it for their suffering. After years of struggling to free and heal ourselves without any help from the medical community we start to vilify those doctors.
But as a doctor, you want to see yourself as a helpful healer. If you don’t see the harm your treatments cause it’s not because of malicious intent or even willful ignorance. It’s because misinformation has been drilled into you by med schools, drug companies, the media and colleagues. You can’t see what you’ve been programmed not to see.
I don’t know if any doctor is going to read this no less change their mind because a lay person with a serious psychiatric label wrote a few words on a blog, but I needed to share. These are things I wish more doctors who prescribe psychiatric medication knew.
Emotional problems are not caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, and psychiatric medications don’t target specific brain abnormalities.
For most physicians I’m sure this goes without saying. You’ve been keeping up with your medical journals and talking with your colleagues.
You know that in 2011 Dr. Ronald Pies then editor-in-chief of the Psychiatric Times, an official publication of the American Psychiatric Association, wrote in an article entitled “Psychiatry’s New Brain-Mind and the Legend of the ‘Chemical Imbalance’”:
“’Psychiatrists think all mental disorders are due to a chemical imbalance!’ In the past 30 years, I don’t believe I have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous claim, except perhaps to mock it. On the other hand, the “chemical imbalance” trope has been tossed around a great deal by opponents of psychiatry, who mendaciously attribute the phrase to psychiatrists themselves.”
In other words, if you are telling your patients to take their medication to treat a chemical imbalance you are neither knowledgeable nor well-trained. It’s nice to know your professional colleagues have your back isn’t it?
If you know all this yet are still misleading your patients about the source of their emotional problems you must think it’s necessary to get them to take the medications they “need”. Your patients don’t need to be told something that’s not true to make decisions that are in their own best interest.
Please be honest with your patients. Tell them the truth. There is no clear connection between any specific neurotransmitter and difficult emotions. Swallowing a chemical to change their brains can have devastating consequences.
Patients don’t recognize their own deterioration.
After I started coming off my meds my balance, speech and concentration improved dramatically. People stopped being irritants and road-blocks and were again beautiful, complex beings whom I loved. I could stay awake more than a few hours a day and activities again brought me joy again. I had no idea just how much harm the medication caused until my mind cleared and I started to regain what I had lost.
It’s clear to me now that I was spiraling downward for years, but when the doctor asked me how I was, I would usually say “Fine” or even, at one point, “Better than ever”. I was entirely unaware of my own decline.
Dr. Peter Breggin calls this “medication spellbinding”. As doctors, you know that people addicted to alcohol or illicit drugs are usually the last to see the terrible consequences of their addiction. Prescription psychiatric medication acts in the same way. In his paper Intoxication Anosognosia: The Spellbinding Effect of Psychiatric Drugs, he compares the two and finds no difference between them.
If you’re going to prescribe you need to ask specific questions about specific adverse effects and know what to look for in the answers for signs of trouble. Just a general inquiry into how your patient is feeling or how their relationships or work is going tells you nothing. Your patient may be completely unaware of their own state because the medication has so muddled them.
The tapering methods suggested by most pharmaceutical companies are far too aggressive.
Most drug companies provide medication tapering advise for prescribers. None of this advice is based on testing these methods on actual patients. It is at best sheer guesswork on their part. Helping people safely taper off these drugs is not in their best interest. It negatively affects their bottom line.
If you’ve tried to help a patient taper off using this advice, you may have found their original complaint returns worse than before. You may even find they have other issues now leading you to believe they have a more serious mental illness. What you’re actually witnessing is horrific withdrawal symptoms which many of us are far too familiar with.
Better advice to help you taper your patients off drugs can be found in the book Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families. This book helps physicians move from drug maintenance to true emotional wellness for their patients.
Tell your patients trying to taper off about websites like survivingantidepressants.com and The Withdrawal Project. Those who have been harmed by medication know a lot more about it than your colleagues or the pharmaceutical companies do. They can help your patients better understand what they’re experiencing and navigate what can be a difficult process.
It’s OK.
You may have realized the truth of what I shared a long time ago, but don’t know what to do with it. In the face of overwhelming pressure from your colleagues, patients, the media and your industry you’ve chosen to believe that somehow, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, these medications must be helpful in treating some as of yet unidentified underlying condition.
The practice of medicine is just that, a practice. It’s designed to change and evolve over time, and you, as it’s practitioners are allowed to do the same. If you’ve been buying into the chemical imbalance theory and missing evidence in your patients of medication spellbinding, it’s completely understandable, but now you know better.
It’s scary to be ahead or outside of your industry, but for the good of your patients you must be.
Thank you for this article