A history of failure - Author and psychologist Bruce Levine pummels psychiatry

[Guest guest]

http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/07/11/levine/print.html

A history of failure

Author and psychologist Bruce Levine pummels psychiatry, psychotropic drugs and

the role both may have played in the case of Yates.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By Amy Benfer

July 11, 2001 | In the 19th century, a woman who experienced depression or

discontent was likely to be diagnosed as " neurotic " and subjected to treatment

ranging from vibrators (to induce orgasm) to clitoridectomy (to ensure that she

never had another one again), with various talk, drug and institutional

therapies in between. In the 1950s, a neurotic woman might find herself

undergoing electroshock therapy, or, if she was lucky, she might be offered the

sedation of Valium. Today, the depressed housewife is likely to find herself on

one of the new antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil or Wellbutrin.

Yates, a reportedly depressed housewife, had, in the years before she

killed her five children, been treated with various drugs, including Wellbutrin,

Effexor and Haldol. According to her husband, Yates suffered from postpartum

depression. According to Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., author of " Commonsense

Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society -- An A to Z Guide to

Rehumanizing Our Lives, " the combination of medicines that Yates reportedly

took, particularly if she was taking them at the same time, may well have been a

prescription for a tragic psychotic break.

We often think of the history of psychiatry as a story of progress, an evolution

from barbaric and invasive treatments to more sophisticated, humane care based

on sound scientific principles. And while it certainly seems like progress to

move from attacking depression with scalpels and electrodes to treating it as a

chemical imbalance with medication, in high-profile cases like those of

Yates and Columbine High School's , who was also being treated with

antidepressants, critics like Levine have serious questions about the efficacy

and safety of these medications.

Levine, a practicing psychologist for more than 15 years, believes it would be

rash and reductive to lay the blame for Yates' and ' homicidal impulses at

the feet of American pharmaceutical companies. But if we are going to treat

depression -- and postpartum psychosis, anorexia, oppositional defiant disorder,

premenstrual syndrome and dozens of other illnesses -- with tools from the

chemistry set, says Levine, it is fair to ask whether we know what we are doing

at all.

Why are we now prescribing stimulants for women who, three decades ago, would

have been put on sedatives? Is this a sign of progress, the result of better

diagnostic tools and more effective treatments? Or is it a sign of social

engineering to accommodate the changing expectations of women in society? Are

the cutting-edge psychiatric treatments of today any less arbitrary than those

of 30 or even 100 years ago? And if we don't know exactly how a medication

works, is it possible that, in rare cases, we might inadvertently give a patient

a medication that triggers a psychotic reaction?

" The history of psychiatry is one of nearly unmitigated failure, " says Levine,

who also is a member of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and

Psychology, an organization that educates the public on the dangers of

psychotropic drugs, electroshock and psychosurgery, as well as argues against

the idea that mental disorders can be traced to biochemical and genetic causes.

The theory that depression and other disorders are caused by " chemical

imbalances " in the body that can be remedied by psychotropic medication is,

according to Levine, " just that: a theory. " Not only does he believe that

psychotropic medication is, at best, ineffective; he also claims that the rush

to solve social problems by medicating individuals is blinding us to the ways in

which people are rebelling against an " institutional society " that doesn't meet

human needs.

Speaking by telephone from his home in Ohio, Levine addressed the ways in which

pharmaceutical companies romance Americans, the effects of the mental health

industry on women and children, and the possible role of psychotropic medication

in the Yates case.

(Several days after Salon's interview with Levine, Families USA, a healthcare

consumers group based in Washington, published data showing that last year,

leading pharmaceutical companies spent more than twice as much money on

advertising, marketing and administration as they did on research into new

medicines.)

You have written: " One of the greatest marketing feats of the past 20 years is

use of pharmaceutical companies' dollars to convince the mass media that

psychiatrists who prescribe these companies' drugs are basing their treatment on

anything resembling science. " What do you mean by this?

Thirty years ago people used to laugh at psychiatry. Since then, the science has

not advanced, but the marketing on the part of pharmaceutical companies has.

Just like any other corporation, these companies bring out new models and new

brands; when people start to notice problems with one product, they bring out

another one which may not be any better than the last one, but its problems are

less well known. These are multibillion-dollar companies that have made sure

that professional organizations and consumer groups hear the same line over and

over again. Even lots of doctors don't have the time to do much more than read

press releases.

But today, even mainstream psychiatry textbooks will tell you that many of these

drugs have no benefit beyond the placebo effect, especially for children.

Meanwhile, estimates are as low as half a million to as high as 2 million

children are being put on these drugs, which may have no greater benefit than a

sugar pill.

All these new antidepressants -- Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft -- are SSRIs [selective

serotonin reuptake inhibitors]; they all increase the level of the

neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. The theory is that this increase fixes

depression.

But they've changed their theory every five or 10 years of which

neurotransmitter fixes depression. So if you look back 20 or 30 years, they were

talking about norepinephrine and that's why they were giving out things like

Tofranil and Elevil.

People debate whether they decided before or after Eli Lilly came out with

Prozac that serotonin was the key for depression. Now they've come out with

Wellbutrin -- and that affects only dopamine.

Part of the insanity of psychiatry is that not only is there no real scientific

evidence that psychotropic drugs are no better for depression than placebos, but

they certainly have a hell of a lot more side effects than sugar pills, and they

also mix these prescriptions together -- especially Wellbutrin and Effexor --

routinely.

Psychiatry textbooks admit that these new antidepressants are no more effective

than the older ones, but some of them do say that the side effects are less

severe. But that, also, is highly debatable.

What are some of the side effects that people taking SSRIs can expect?

What we know for sure is that patients who take Prozac and other SSRIs have

sexual difficulty. There is a debate as to how high these percentages go -- but

some people say it can be as high as 70 percent. Overall, what these drugs do is

anaesthetize you. They numb you. Some people like that feeling, just like some

people like to numb themselves with alcohol or other mood-altering drugs. For

them, it's like the drug soma, from " Brave New World. " But for some people,

taking a drug that makes them feel less is really scary.

For example, I have had patients on psychiatric drugs who have had genuine

tragedy occur in their lives -- a friend dies, or something like that -- and

they have reacted with a robotic response, or if not quite robotic, it's a

little less full than it would be otherwise. They have this basic feeling inside

that nothing is affecting them.

Another one of the great deceptions is what the drug companies like to call

" selective serotonin. " People believe that upping serotonin only will only

affect their depression. What they don't tell people is that serotonin is

everywhere in your body. So when you change the amount of serotonin in the

neurosynapses in your brain, you are also changing it in your cerebellum, in

your gastrointestinal tract. A lot of people have stomach problems when they are

taking these things. It affects your sleep cycles. There is almost no part of

your body that serotonin doesn't affect.

A lot of people have withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking these drugs. That

was another initial deception: They were trying to tell people that there would

be no addiction, and no withdrawal symptoms. That's totally not true. If you

take any kind of drug that affects your neurotransmitters, when you stop taking

it, your body will have to rebound. There are all kinds of withdrawal symptoms.

Their euphemism now is " discontinuation syndrome. "

Newspapers have told us quite a bit about the kind of psychiatric treatment

Yates was receiving. What kind of side effects might her treatment have

caused?

In the case of Yates, according to news reports, she was getting

Wellbutrin and also another antidepressant, Effexor. The news reports don't say

if she was getting them recently, but it's clear she was on both of them

sometime in the last couple of years. They all say she was pulled off this

antipsychotic Haldol. When people are taken off Haldol, they routinely become

really agitated, they feel completely out of control. Sometimes people can't

even keep food down; if they haven't eaten for a while, they often experience

dry heaving.

But if you add all three of these drugs together, they were playing with three

different neurotransmitters. Here's the interesting thing: The Wellbutrin ups

dopamine, the Effexor ups the serotonin and norepinephrine. You know what else

ups all three of those? It's called cocaine. If you want to be a one-stop

shopper, just go ahead and do cocaine. It's a little different, because cocaine

gives you a quicker hit, and these things take a little longer.

Haldol suppresses dopamine. If they were giving her the Wellbutrin at the same

time -- which is not clear from the news reports -- they were giving her another

drug that increased it. When people hear this sort of thing, they immediately

conclude that Yates must be the victim of malpractice. But this sort of

thing happens all the time. This is the standard of care, however illogical it

may sound.

How do you explain something like postpartum depression? Would you consider it a

chemical imbalance triggered by a physical act in the body, or a social

phenomenon brought on by the stress of raising a child? How best would you treat

it?

Some folks explain postpartum depression by saying that it is rooted in hormonal

changes. If that is your argument, then it would make sense that you would want

to treat it through drug therapy. But once people have labeled it as a chemical

imbalance, they start to treat it with all these psychiatric drugs when it

hasn't been proven that serotonin is the cause of these women's problems.

Not everyone will flip out like Yates, but for a certain percentage of

women who are particularly sensitive to these drugs, it may increase their

chances of having a psychotic break.

It's a given that these women who are going through this are having a really

hard time. They are down, they are really hurting. The issue is whether it is

helpful to create a syndrome for it. For some people, it may make them feel

better to know that there is a name for what they are going through, and it may

make it easier for them to explain their condition to other people.

The downside is not just the drugs and the side effects; it's also that these

people are missing out on what human beings are supposed to be doing when they

are going through this kind of situation. The No. 1 thing they should be doing

is supporting each other emotionally -- validating each other's feelings,

building some real trust among people. When you help someone get through a hard

time, that's how you build strong bonds and families and communities.

People would rather numb themselves with drugs than admit that we live in a

pretty weird society, one in which no one is really around to physically help

these women who find themselves suddenly the only person in charge of this kid.

Their husband is off at work, their friends have jobs. For some people, that can

be a pretty crazy situation. For 99.9 percent of the history of the human race,

no one ever raised a kid in that manner. When a child was born, the mother could

find plenty of emotional and physical support, and the burden was not resting

entirely on one person.

Over the last years, we have seen a huge increase in the number of syndromes.

The DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] is now the size

of a phone book. More people are diagnosed with depression than ever before. Are

there really this many new disorders? Or is this a social rather than a medical

phenomenon?

One way you can explain these increases is to look at the kind of marketing done

by the drug companies. But that's a little too easy. If it were all a complete

sham, you wouldn't see such a huge increase in true problems -- in the United

States, teen suicides have tripled since 1960; we have twice as many obese kids

as we did 30 years ago. No one is making that stuff up.

Psychiatry is part of the problem in that it is exploiting this situation, but

it is also diverting people from taking a true look at what is happening in the

culture to cause all of these problems. Our society is perhaps the most

economically successful culture in the history of the world, materially. But in

our one-dimensional quest for productivity, consumption and efficiency, we have

forgotten about a whole bunch of things that people need to stay human -- like

community, autonomy, diversity. All of those things have shrunk.

Taken together, this may help to explain why so many kids are being diagnosed

with attention deficit disorder and all these other various childhood disorders.

The largest increases we have seen in new illnesses are the ones that affect

children.

There are real problems out there: You do have kids taking guns to school, you

do have people like Yates, you do have this huge increase in people who

think they are in pretty bad shape. But why is this going on?

Is it going on because more people have chemical imbalances? No. It makes no

sense to believe that human beings can change biologically in one or two

generations. Obviously, something else has changed in our culture, in our

society.

But once you start looking at that, you have to start challenging the

assumptions of the status quo. And people at the top of society don't want to do

that. People who are at the top of institutional hierarchies who are doing quite

well don't want to look at that. People on the streets have no problem with what

I am saying. To them, it just sounds like common sense.

In general, you can either believe in numbing, or you can believe in healing.

It's very hard to do both. You can either believe in grieving over losses, or

you can believe in denying losses. You can believe in people supporting and

helping one another, that you don't have to have a Ph.D. or an M.D., that if

people care about each other that they can provide emotional and physical

support better than any so-called authorities. Or you can believe that unless

you have a degree or expertise that you can't help anybody.

Looking at the history of drugs that have been marketed to women, it seems that

you can make an argument that psychiatrists and drug companies are selecting for

socially desirable traits. For example, in the '50s, when women were supposed to

stay at home, Valium was the drug of choice. Today, the drug of choice is

Prozac. Are we medicating people to fit into society?

Back in the '50s and '60s, they wanted docile women. So if any woman was a

little more upset or assertive than average, she would be given librium or

Valium. Nowadays, we want good little consumers, we want good little workers. We

don't want women to be docile; we want them to be out there shopping and

working. So we don't want those old drugs anymore -- they make you sleepy, they

make you a little zoned out. But Prozac and Paxil seem perfect for the new woman

-- they just make you numb, but you can still shop and work when you are on

them.

Clearly, I don't think it's desirable. Part of having a human society is making

room for all kinds of people. You don't chemically alter them to make them fit

in. And it doesn't work. But that is exactly what they are trying to do --

especially to kids.

With kids, it's really obvious. One hundred years ago, 6 percent of kids

graduated from high school. During World War II, it was about 25 percent. Almost

nobody went to college. They worked on farms, they worked as apprentices.

Today, if you are a middle- to upper-middle-class parent and your kid doesn't go

to college, it means you are a failure as a parent. I work with kids all the

time. And some of the smartest kids I've ever had don't belong in college at

all. They just aren't academic types. But when teachers come to parents and say,

our kid is getting C's and D's, and they aren't interested in Shakespeare, the

parents start freaking out and thinking that their child will never get into

college, and never get a job.

We have created that. And that is what we, as a culture, don't want to admit:

We've created fewer and fewer places for different kinds of personalities to

feel good about themselves and to make a living.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer

Amy Benfer is associate editor of Life.

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[Guest guest]

http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/07/11/levine/print.html

A history of failure

Author and psychologist Bruce Levine pummels psychiatry, psychotropic drugs and

the role both may have played in the case of Yates.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By Amy Benfer

July 11, 2001 | In the 19th century, a woman who experienced depression or

discontent was likely to be diagnosed as " neurotic " and subjected to treatment

ranging from vibrators (to induce orgasm) to clitoridectomy (to ensure that she

never had another one again), with various talk, drug and institutional

therapies in between. In the 1950s, a neurotic woman might find herself

undergoing electroshock therapy, or, if she was lucky, she might be offered the

sedation of Valium. Today, the depressed housewife is likely to find herself on

one of the new antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil or Wellbutrin.

Yates, a reportedly depressed housewife, had, in the years before she

killed her five children, been treated with various drugs, including Wellbutrin,

Effexor and Haldol. According to her husband, Yates suffered from postpartum

depression. According to Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., author of " Commonsense

Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society -- An A to Z Guide to

Rehumanizing Our Lives, " the combination of medicines that Yates reportedly

took, particularly if she was taking them at the same time, may well have been a

prescription for a tragic psychotic break.

We often think of the history of psychiatry as a story of progress, an evolution

from barbaric and invasive treatments to more sophisticated, humane care based

on sound scientific principles. And while it certainly seems like progress to

move from attacking depression with scalpels and electrodes to treating it as a

chemical imbalance with medication, in high-profile cases like those of

Yates and Columbine High School's , who was also being treated with

antidepressants, critics like Levine have serious questions about the efficacy

and safety of these medications.

Levine, a practicing psychologist for more than 15 years, believes it would be

rash and reductive to lay the blame for Yates' and ' homicidal impulses at

the feet of American pharmaceutical companies. But if we are going to treat

depression -- and postpartum psychosis, anorexia, oppositional defiant disorder,

premenstrual syndrome and dozens of other illnesses -- with tools from the

chemistry set, says Levine, it is fair to ask whether we know what we are doing

at all.

Why are we now prescribing stimulants for women who, three decades ago, would

have been put on sedatives? Is this a sign of progress, the result of better

diagnostic tools and more effective treatments? Or is it a sign of social

engineering to accommodate the changing expectations of women in society? Are

the cutting-edge psychiatric treatments of today any less arbitrary than those

of 30 or even 100 years ago? And if we don't know exactly how a medication

works, is it possible that, in rare cases, we might inadvertently give a patient

a medication that triggers a psychotic reaction?

" The history of psychiatry is one of nearly unmitigated failure, " says Levine,

who also is a member of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and

Psychology, an organization that educates the public on the dangers of

psychotropic drugs, electroshock and psychosurgery, as well as argues against

the idea that mental disorders can be traced to biochemical and genetic causes.

The theory that depression and other disorders are caused by " chemical

imbalances " in the body that can be remedied by psychotropic medication is,

according to Levine, " just that: a theory. " Not only does he believe that

psychotropic medication is, at best, ineffective; he also claims that the rush

to solve social problems by medicating individuals is blinding us to the ways in

which people are rebelling against an " institutional society " that doesn't meet

human needs.

Speaking by telephone from his home in Ohio, Levine addressed the ways in which

pharmaceutical companies romance Americans, the effects of the mental health

industry on women and children, and the possible role of psychotropic medication

in the Yates case.

(Several days after Salon's interview with Levine, Families USA, a healthcare

consumers group based in Washington, published data showing that last year,

leading pharmaceutical companies spent more than twice as much money on

advertising, marketing and administration as they did on research into new

medicines.)

You have written: " One of the greatest marketing feats of the past 20 years is

use of pharmaceutical companies' dollars to convince the mass media that

psychiatrists who prescribe these companies' drugs are basing their treatment on

anything resembling science. " What do you mean by this?

Thirty years ago people used to laugh at psychiatry. Since then, the science has

not advanced, but the marketing on the part of pharmaceutical companies has.

Just like any other corporation, these companies bring out new models and new

brands; when people start to notice problems with one product, they bring out

another one which may not be any better than the last one, but its problems are

less well known. These are multibillion-dollar companies that have made sure

that professional organizations and consumer groups hear the same line over and

over again. Even lots of doctors don't have the time to do much more than read

press releases.

But today, even mainstream psychiatry textbooks will tell you that many of these

drugs have no benefit beyond the placebo effect, especially for children.

Meanwhile, estimates are as low as half a million to as high as 2 million

children are being put on these drugs, which may have no greater benefit than a

sugar pill.

All these new antidepressants -- Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft -- are SSRIs [selective

serotonin reuptake inhibitors]; they all increase the level of the

neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. The theory is that this increase fixes

depression.

But they've changed their theory every five or 10 years of which

neurotransmitter fixes depression. So if you look back 20 or 30 years, they were

talking about norepinephrine and that's why they were giving out things like

Tofranil and Elevil.

People debate whether they decided before or after Eli Lilly came out with

Prozac that serotonin was the key for depression. Now they've come out with

Wellbutrin -- and that affects only dopamine.

Part of the insanity of psychiatry is that not only is there no real scientific

evidence that psychotropic drugs are no better for depression than placebos, but

they certainly have a hell of a lot more side effects than sugar pills, and they

also mix these prescriptions together -- especially Wellbutrin and Effexor --

routinely.

Psychiatry textbooks admit that these new antidepressants are no more effective

than the older ones, but some of them do say that the side effects are less

severe. But that, also, is highly debatable.

What are some of the side effects that people taking SSRIs can expect?

What we know for sure is that patients who take Prozac and other SSRIs have

sexual difficulty. There is a debate as to how high these percentages go -- but

some people say it can be as high as 70 percent. Overall, what these drugs do is

anaesthetize you. They numb you. Some people like that feeling, just like some

people like to numb themselves with alcohol or other mood-altering drugs. For

them, it's like the drug soma, from " Brave New World. " But for some people,

taking a drug that makes them feel less is really scary.

For example, I have had patients on psychiatric drugs who have had genuine

tragedy occur in their lives -- a friend dies, or something like that -- and

they have reacted with a robotic response, or if not quite robotic, it's a

little less full than it would be otherwise. They have this basic feeling inside

that nothing is affecting them.

Another one of the great deceptions is what the drug companies like to call

" selective serotonin. " People believe that upping serotonin only will only

affect their depression. What they don't tell people is that serotonin is

everywhere in your body. So when you change the amount of serotonin in the

neurosynapses in your brain, you are also changing it in your cerebellum, in

your gastrointestinal tract. A lot of people have stomach problems when they are

taking these things. It affects your sleep cycles. There is almost no part of

your body that serotonin doesn't affect.

A lot of people have withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking these drugs. That

was another initial deception: They were trying to tell people that there would

be no addiction, and no withdrawal symptoms. That's totally not true. If you

take any kind of drug that affects your neurotransmitters, when you stop taking

it, your body will have to rebound. There are all kinds of withdrawal symptoms.

Their euphemism now is " discontinuation syndrome. "

Newspapers have told us quite a bit about the kind of psychiatric treatment

Yates was receiving. What kind of side effects might her treatment have

caused?

In the case of Yates, according to news reports, she was getting

Wellbutrin and also another antidepressant, Effexor. The news reports don't say

if she was getting them recently, but it's clear she was on both of them

sometime in the last couple of years. They all say she was pulled off this

antipsychotic Haldol. When people are taken off Haldol, they routinely become

really agitated, they feel completely out of control. Sometimes people can't

even keep food down; if they haven't eaten for a while, they often experience

dry heaving.

But if you add all three of these drugs together, they were playing with three

different neurotransmitters. Here's the interesting thing: The Wellbutrin ups

dopamine, the Effexor ups the serotonin and norepinephrine. You know what else

ups all three of those? It's called cocaine. If you want to be a one-stop

shopper, just go ahead and do cocaine. It's a little different, because cocaine

gives you a quicker hit, and these things take a little longer.

Haldol suppresses dopamine. If they were giving her the Wellbutrin at the same

time -- which is not clear from the news reports -- they were giving her another

drug that increased it. When people hear this sort of thing, they immediately

conclude that Yates must be the victim of malpractice. But this sort of

thing happens all the time. This is the standard of care, however illogical it

may sound.

How do you explain something like postpartum depression? Would you consider it a

chemical imbalance triggered by a physical act in the body, or a social

phenomenon brought on by the stress of raising a child? How best would you treat

it?

Some folks explain postpartum depression by saying that it is rooted in hormonal

changes. If that is your argument, then it would make sense that you would want

to treat it through drug therapy. But once people have labeled it as a chemical

imbalance, they start to treat it with all these psychiatric drugs when it

hasn't been proven that serotonin is the cause of these women's problems.

Not everyone will flip out like Yates, but for a certain percentage of

women who are particularly sensitive to these drugs, it may increase their

chances of having a psychotic break.

It's a given that these women who are going through this are having a really

hard time. They are down, they are really hurting. The issue is whether it is

helpful to create a syndrome for it. For some people, it may make them feel

better to know that there is a name for what they are going through, and it may

make it easier for them to explain their condition to other people.

The downside is not just the drugs and the side effects; it's also that these

people are missing out on what human beings are supposed to be doing when they

are going through this kind of situation. The No. 1 thing they should be doing

is supporting each other emotionally -- validating each other's feelings,

building some real trust among people. When you help someone get through a hard

time, that's how you build strong bonds and families and communities.

People would rather numb themselves with drugs than admit that we live in a

pretty weird society, one in which no one is really around to physically help

these women who find themselves suddenly the only person in charge of this kid.

Their husband is off at work, their friends have jobs. For some people, that can

be a pretty crazy situation. For 99.9 percent of the history of the human race,

no one ever raised a kid in that manner. When a child was born, the mother could

find plenty of emotional and physical support, and the burden was not resting

entirely on one person.

Over the last years, we have seen a huge increase in the number of syndromes.

The DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] is now the size

of a phone book. More people are diagnosed with depression than ever before. Are

there really this many new disorders? Or is this a social rather than a medical

phenomenon?

One way you can explain these increases is to look at the kind of marketing done

by the drug companies. But that's a little too easy. If it were all a complete

sham, you wouldn't see such a huge increase in true problems -- in the United

States, teen suicides have tripled since 1960; we have twice as many obese kids

as we did 30 years ago. No one is making that stuff up.

Psychiatry is part of the problem in that it is exploiting this situation, but

it is also diverting people from taking a true look at what is happening in the

culture to cause all of these problems. Our society is perhaps the most

economically successful culture in the history of the world, materially. But in

our one-dimensional quest for productivity, consumption and efficiency, we have

forgotten about a whole bunch of things that people need to stay human -- like

community, autonomy, diversity. All of those things have shrunk.

Taken together, this may help to explain why so many kids are being diagnosed

with attention deficit disorder and all these other various childhood disorders.

The largest increases we have seen in new illnesses are the ones that affect

children.

There are real problems out there: You do have kids taking guns to school, you

do have people like Yates, you do have this huge increase in people who

think they are in pretty bad shape. But why is this going on?

Is it going on because more people have chemical imbalances? No. It makes no

sense to believe that human beings can change biologically in one or two

generations. Obviously, something else has changed in our culture, in our

society.

But once you start looking at that, you have to start challenging the

assumptions of the status quo. And people at the top of society don't want to do

that. People who are at the top of institutional hierarchies who are doing quite

well don't want to look at that. People on the streets have no problem with what

I am saying. To them, it just sounds like common sense.

In general, you can either believe in numbing, or you can believe in healing.

It's very hard to do both. You can either believe in grieving over losses, or

you can believe in denying losses. You can believe in people supporting and

helping one another, that you don't have to have a Ph.D. or an M.D., that if

people care about each other that they can provide emotional and physical

support better than any so-called authorities. Or you can believe that unless

you have a degree or expertise that you can't help anybody.

Looking at the history of drugs that have been marketed to women, it seems that

you can make an argument that psychiatrists and drug companies are selecting for

socially desirable traits. For example, in the '50s, when women were supposed to

stay at home, Valium was the drug of choice. Today, the drug of choice is

Prozac. Are we medicating people to fit into society?

Back in the '50s and '60s, they wanted docile women. So if any woman was a

little more upset or assertive than average, she would be given librium or

Valium. Nowadays, we want good little consumers, we want good little workers. We

don't want women to be docile; we want them to be out there shopping and

working. So we don't want those old drugs anymore -- they make you sleepy, they

make you a little zoned out. But Prozac and Paxil seem perfect for the new woman

-- they just make you numb, but you can still shop and work when you are on

them.

Clearly, I don't think it's desirable. Part of having a human society is making

room for all kinds of people. You don't chemically alter them to make them fit

in. And it doesn't work. But that is exactly what they are trying to do --

especially to kids.

With kids, it's really obvious. One hundred years ago, 6 percent of kids

graduated from high school. During World War II, it was about 25 percent. Almost

nobody went to college. They worked on farms, they worked as apprentices.

Today, if you are a middle- to upper-middle-class parent and your kid doesn't go

to college, it means you are a failure as a parent. I work with kids all the

time. And some of the smartest kids I've ever had don't belong in college at

all. They just aren't academic types. But when teachers come to parents and say,

our kid is getting C's and D's, and they aren't interested in Shakespeare, the

parents start freaking out and thinking that their child will never get into

college, and never get a job.

We have created that. And that is what we, as a culture, don't want to admit:

We've created fewer and fewer places for different kinds of personalities to

feel good about themselves and to make a living.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer

Amy Benfer is associate editor of Life.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made

available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights,

democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This

constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in

Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is

distributed without profit.

[Guest guest]

http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/07/11/levine/print.html

A history of failure

Author and psychologist Bruce Levine pummels psychiatry, psychotropic drugs and

the role both may have played in the case of Yates.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By Amy Benfer

July 11, 2001 | In the 19th century, a woman who experienced depression or

discontent was likely to be diagnosed as " neurotic " and subjected to treatment

ranging from vibrators (to induce orgasm) to clitoridectomy (to ensure that she

never had another one again), with various talk, drug and institutional

therapies in between. In the 1950s, a neurotic woman might find herself

undergoing electroshock therapy, or, if she was lucky, she might be offered the

sedation of Valium. Today, the depressed housewife is likely to find herself on

one of the new antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil or Wellbutrin.

Yates, a reportedly depressed housewife, had, in the years before she

killed her five children, been treated with various drugs, including Wellbutrin,

Effexor and Haldol. According to her husband, Yates suffered from postpartum

depression. According to Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., author of " Commonsense

Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society -- An A to Z Guide to

Rehumanizing Our Lives, " the combination of medicines that Yates reportedly

took, particularly if she was taking them at the same time, may well have been a

prescription for a tragic psychotic break.

We often think of the history of psychiatry as a story of progress, an evolution

from barbaric and invasive treatments to more sophisticated, humane care based

on sound scientific principles. And while it certainly seems like progress to

move from attacking depression with scalpels and electrodes to treating it as a

chemical imbalance with medication, in high-profile cases like those of

Yates and Columbine High School's , who was also being treated with

antidepressants, critics like Levine have serious questions about the efficacy

and safety of these medications.

Levine, a practicing psychologist for more than 15 years, believes it would be

rash and reductive to lay the blame for Yates' and ' homicidal impulses at

the feet of American pharmaceutical companies. But if we are going to treat

depression -- and postpartum psychosis, anorexia, oppositional defiant disorder,

premenstrual syndrome and dozens of other illnesses -- with tools from the

chemistry set, says Levine, it is fair to ask whether we know what we are doing

at all.

Why are we now prescribing stimulants for women who, three decades ago, would

have been put on sedatives? Is this a sign of progress, the result of better

diagnostic tools and more effective treatments? Or is it a sign of social

engineering to accommodate the changing expectations of women in society? Are

the cutting-edge psychiatric treatments of today any less arbitrary than those

of 30 or even 100 years ago? And if we don't know exactly how a medication

works, is it possible that, in rare cases, we might inadvertently give a patient

a medication that triggers a psychotic reaction?

" The history of psychiatry is one of nearly unmitigated failure, " says Levine,

who also is a member of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and

Psychology, an organization that educates the public on the dangers of

psychotropic drugs, electroshock and psychosurgery, as well as argues against

the idea that mental disorders can be traced to biochemical and genetic causes.

The theory that depression and other disorders are caused by " chemical

imbalances " in the body that can be remedied by psychotropic medication is,

according to Levine, " just that: a theory. " Not only does he believe that

psychotropic medication is, at best, ineffective; he also claims that the rush

to solve social problems by medicating individuals is blinding us to the ways in

which people are rebelling against an " institutional society " that doesn't meet

human needs.

Speaking by telephone from his home in Ohio, Levine addressed the ways in which

pharmaceutical companies romance Americans, the effects of the mental health

industry on women and children, and the possible role of psychotropic medication

in the Yates case.

(Several days after Salon's interview with Levine, Families USA, a healthcare

consumers group based in Washington, published data showing that last year,

leading pharmaceutical companies spent more than twice as much money on

advertising, marketing and administration as they did on research into new

medicines.)

You have written: " One of the greatest marketing feats of the past 20 years is

use of pharmaceutical companies' dollars to convince the mass media that

psychiatrists who prescribe these companies' drugs are basing their treatment on

anything resembling science. " What do you mean by this?

Thirty years ago people used to laugh at psychiatry. Since then, the science has

not advanced, but the marketing on the part of pharmaceutical companies has.

Just like any other corporation, these companies bring out new models and new

brands; when people start to notice problems with one product, they bring out

another one which may not be any better than the last one, but its problems are

less well known. These are multibillion-dollar companies that have made sure

that professional organizations and consumer groups hear the same line over and

over again. Even lots of doctors don't have the time to do much more than read

press releases.

But today, even mainstream psychiatry textbooks will tell you that many of these

drugs have no benefit beyond the placebo effect, especially for children.

Meanwhile, estimates are as low as half a million to as high as 2 million

children are being put on these drugs, which may have no greater benefit than a

sugar pill.

All these new antidepressants -- Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft -- are SSRIs [selective

serotonin reuptake inhibitors]; they all increase the level of the

neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. The theory is that this increase fixes

depression.

But they've changed their theory every five or 10 years of which

neurotransmitter fixes depression. So if you look back 20 or 30 years, they were

talking about norepinephrine and that's why they were giving out things like

Tofranil and Elevil.

People debate whether they decided before or after Eli Lilly came out with

Prozac that serotonin was the key for depression. Now they've come out with

Wellbutrin -- and that affects only dopamine.

Part of the insanity of psychiatry is that not only is there no real scientific

evidence that psychotropic drugs are no better for depression than placebos, but

they certainly have a hell of a lot more side effects than sugar pills, and they

also mix these prescriptions together -- especially Wellbutrin and Effexor --

routinely.

Psychiatry textbooks admit that these new antidepressants are no more effective

than the older ones, but some of them do say that the side effects are less

severe. But that, also, is highly debatable.

What are some of the side effects that people taking SSRIs can expect?

What we know for sure is that patients who take Prozac and other SSRIs have

sexual difficulty. There is a debate as to how high these percentages go -- but

some people say it can be as high as 70 percent. Overall, what these drugs do is

anaesthetize you. They numb you. Some people like that feeling, just like some

people like to numb themselves with alcohol or other mood-altering drugs. For

them, it's like the drug soma, from " Brave New World. " But for some people,

taking a drug that makes them feel less is really scary.

For example, I have had patients on psychiatric drugs who have had genuine

tragedy occur in their lives -- a friend dies, or something like that -- and

they have reacted with a robotic response, or if not quite robotic, it's a

little less full than it would be otherwise. They have this basic feeling inside

that nothing is affecting them.

Another one of the great deceptions is what the drug companies like to call

" selective serotonin. " People believe that upping serotonin only will only

affect their depression. What they don't tell people is that serotonin is

everywhere in your body. So when you change the amount of serotonin in the

neurosynapses in your brain, you are also changing it in your cerebellum, in

your gastrointestinal tract. A lot of people have stomach problems when they are

taking these things. It affects your sleep cycles. There is almost no part of

your body that serotonin doesn't affect.

A lot of people have withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking these drugs. That

was another initial deception: They were trying to tell people that there would

be no addiction, and no withdrawal symptoms. That's totally not true. If you

take any kind of drug that affects your neurotransmitters, when you stop taking

it, your body will have to rebound. There are all kinds of withdrawal symptoms.

Their euphemism now is " discontinuation syndrome. "

Newspapers have told us quite a bit about the kind of psychiatric treatment

Yates was receiving. What kind of side effects might her treatment have

caused?

In the case of Yates, according to news reports, she was getting

Wellbutrin and also another antidepressant, Effexor. The news reports don't say

if she was getting them recently, but it's clear she was on both of them

sometime in the last couple of years. They all say she was pulled off this

antipsychotic Haldol. When people are taken off Haldol, they routinely become

really agitated, they feel completely out of control. Sometimes people can't

even keep food down; if they haven't eaten for a while, they often experience

dry heaving.

But if you add all three of these drugs together, they were playing with three

different neurotransmitters. Here's the interesting thing: The Wellbutrin ups

dopamine, the Effexor ups the serotonin and norepinephrine. You know what else

ups all three of those? It's called cocaine. If you want to be a one-stop

shopper, just go ahead and do cocaine. It's a little different, because cocaine

gives you a quicker hit, and these things take a little longer.

Haldol suppresses dopamine. If they were giving her the Wellbutrin at the same

time -- which is not clear from the news reports -- they were giving her another

drug that increased it. When people hear this sort of thing, they immediately

conclude that Yates must be the victim of malpractice. But this sort of

thing happens all the time. This is the standard of care, however illogical it

may sound.

How do you explain something like postpartum depression? Would you consider it a

chemical imbalance triggered by a physical act in the body, or a social

phenomenon brought on by the stress of raising a child? How best would you treat

it?

Some folks explain postpartum depression by saying that it is rooted in hormonal

changes. If that is your argument, then it would make sense that you would want

to treat it through drug therapy. But once people have labeled it as a chemical

imbalance, they start to treat it with all these psychiatric drugs when it

hasn't been proven that serotonin is the cause of these women's problems.

Not everyone will flip out like Yates, but for a certain percentage of

women who are particularly sensitive to these drugs, it may increase their

chances of having a psychotic break.

It's a given that these women who are going through this are having a really

hard time. They are down, they are really hurting. The issue is whether it is

helpful to create a syndrome for it. For some people, it may make them feel

better to know that there is a name for what they are going through, and it may

make it easier for them to explain their condition to other people.

The downside is not just the drugs and the side effects; it's also that these

people are missing out on what human beings are supposed to be doing when they

are going through this kind of situation. The No. 1 thing they should be doing

is supporting each other emotionally -- validating each other's feelings,

building some real trust among people. When you help someone get through a hard

time, that's how you build strong bonds and families and communities.

People would rather numb themselves with drugs than admit that we live in a

pretty weird society, one in which no one is really around to physically help

these women who find themselves suddenly the only person in charge of this kid.

Their husband is off at work, their friends have jobs. For some people, that can

be a pretty crazy situation. For 99.9 percent of the history of the human race,

no one ever raised a kid in that manner. When a child was born, the mother could

find plenty of emotional and physical support, and the burden was not resting

entirely on one person.

Over the last years, we have seen a huge increase in the number of syndromes.

The DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] is now the size

of a phone book. More people are diagnosed with depression than ever before. Are

there really this many new disorders? Or is this a social rather than a medical

phenomenon?

One way you can explain these increases is to look at the kind of marketing done

by the drug companies. But that's a little too easy. If it were all a complete

sham, you wouldn't see such a huge increase in true problems -- in the United

States, teen suicides have tripled since 1960; we have twice as many obese kids

as we did 30 years ago. No one is making that stuff up.

Psychiatry is part of the problem in that it is exploiting this situation, but

it is also diverting people from taking a true look at what is happening in the

culture to cause all of these problems. Our society is perhaps the most

economically successful culture in the history of the world, materially. But in

our one-dimensional quest for productivity, consumption and efficiency, we have

forgotten about a whole bunch of things that people need to stay human -- like

community, autonomy, diversity. All of those things have shrunk.

Taken together, this may help to explain why so many kids are being diagnosed

with attention deficit disorder and all these other various childhood disorders.

The largest increases we have seen in new illnesses are the ones that affect

children.

There are real problems out there: You do have kids taking guns to school, you

do have people like Yates, you do have this huge increase in people who

think they are in pretty bad shape. But why is this going on?

Is it going on because more people have chemical imbalances? No. It makes no

sense to believe that human beings can change biologically in one or two

generations. Obviously, something else has changed in our culture, in our

society.

But once you start looking at that, you have to start challenging the

assumptions of the status quo. And people at the top of society don't want to do

that. People who are at the top of institutional hierarchies who are doing quite

well don't want to look at that. People on the streets have no problem with what

I am saying. To them, it just sounds like common sense.

In general, you can either believe in numbing, or you can believe in healing.

It's very hard to do both. You can either believe in grieving over losses, or

you can believe in denying losses. You can believe in people supporting and

helping one another, that you don't have to have a Ph.D. or an M.D., that if

people care about each other that they can provide emotional and physical

support better than any so-called authorities. Or you can believe that unless

you have a degree or expertise that you can't help anybody.

Looking at the history of drugs that have been marketed to women, it seems that

you can make an argument that psychiatrists and drug companies are selecting for

socially desirable traits. For example, in the '50s, when women were supposed to

stay at home, Valium was the drug of choice. Today, the drug of choice is

Prozac. Are we medicating people to fit into society?

Back in the '50s and '60s, they wanted docile women. So if any woman was a

little more upset or assertive than average, she would be given librium or

Valium. Nowadays, we want good little consumers, we want good little workers. We

don't want women to be docile; we want them to be out there shopping and

working. So we don't want those old drugs anymore -- they make you sleepy, they

make you a little zoned out. But Prozac and Paxil seem perfect for the new woman

-- they just make you numb, but you can still shop and work when you are on

them.

Clearly, I don't think it's desirable. Part of having a human society is making

room for all kinds of people. You don't chemically alter them to make them fit

in. And it doesn't work. But that is exactly what they are trying to do --

especially to kids.

With kids, it's really obvious. One hundred years ago, 6 percent of kids

graduated from high school. During World War II, it was about 25 percent. Almost

nobody went to college. They worked on farms, they worked as apprentices.

Today, if you are a middle- to upper-middle-class parent and your kid doesn't go

to college, it means you are a failure as a parent. I work with kids all the

time. And some of the smartest kids I've ever had don't belong in college at

all. They just aren't academic types. But when teachers come to parents and say,

our kid is getting C's and D's, and they aren't interested in Shakespeare, the

parents start freaking out and thinking that their child will never get into

college, and never get a job.

We have created that. And that is what we, as a culture, don't want to admit:

We've created fewer and fewer places for different kinds of personalities to

feel good about themselves and to make a living.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer

Amy Benfer is associate editor of Life.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made

available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights,

democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This

constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in

Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is

distributed without profit.

[Guest guest]

http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/07/11/levine/print.html

A history of failure

Author and psychologist Bruce Levine pummels psychiatry, psychotropic drugs and

the role both may have played in the case of Yates.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By Amy Benfer

July 11, 2001 | In the 19th century, a woman who experienced depression or

discontent was likely to be diagnosed as " neurotic " and subjected to treatment

ranging from vibrators (to induce orgasm) to clitoridectomy (to ensure that she

never had another one again), with various talk, drug and institutional

therapies in between. In the 1950s, a neurotic woman might find herself

undergoing electroshock therapy, or, if she was lucky, she might be offered the

sedation of Valium. Today, the depressed housewife is likely to find herself on

one of the new antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil or Wellbutrin.

Yates, a reportedly depressed housewife, had, in the years before she

killed her five children, been treated with various drugs, including Wellbutrin,

Effexor and Haldol. According to her husband, Yates suffered from postpartum

depression. According to Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., author of " Commonsense

Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society -- An A to Z Guide to

Rehumanizing Our Lives, " the combination of medicines that Yates reportedly

took, particularly if she was taking them at the same time, may well have been a

prescription for a tragic psychotic break.

We often think of the history of psychiatry as a story of progress, an evolution

from barbaric and invasive treatments to more sophisticated, humane care based

on sound scientific principles. And while it certainly seems like progress to

move from attacking depression with scalpels and electrodes to treating it as a

chemical imbalance with medication, in high-profile cases like those of

Yates and Columbine High School's , who was also being treated with

antidepressants, critics like Levine have serious questions about the efficacy

and safety of these medications.

Levine, a practicing psychologist for more than 15 years, believes it would be

rash and reductive to lay the blame for Yates' and ' homicidal impulses at

the feet of American pharmaceutical companies. But if we are going to treat

depression -- and postpartum psychosis, anorexia, oppositional defiant disorder,

premenstrual syndrome and dozens of other illnesses -- with tools from the

chemistry set, says Levine, it is fair to ask whether we know what we are doing

at all.

Why are we now prescribing stimulants for women who, three decades ago, would

have been put on sedatives? Is this a sign of progress, the result of better

diagnostic tools and more effective treatments? Or is it a sign of social

engineering to accommodate the changing expectations of women in society? Are

the cutting-edge psychiatric treatments of today any less arbitrary than those

of 30 or even 100 years ago? And if we don't know exactly how a medication

works, is it possible that, in rare cases, we might inadvertently give a patient

a medication that triggers a psychotic reaction?

" The history of psychiatry is one of nearly unmitigated failure, " says Levine,

who also is a member of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and

Psychology, an organization that educates the public on the dangers of

psychotropic drugs, electroshock and psychosurgery, as well as argues against

the idea that mental disorders can be traced to biochemical and genetic causes.

The theory that depression and other disorders are caused by " chemical

imbalances " in the body that can be remedied by psychotropic medication is,

according to Levine, " just that: a theory. " Not only does he believe that

psychotropic medication is, at best, ineffective; he also claims that the rush

to solve social problems by medicating individuals is blinding us to the ways in

which people are rebelling against an " institutional society " that doesn't meet

human needs.

Speaking by telephone from his home in Ohio, Levine addressed the ways in which

pharmaceutical companies romance Americans, the effects of the mental health

industry on women and children, and the possible role of psychotropic medication

in the Yates case.

(Several days after Salon's interview with Levine, Families USA, a healthcare

consumers group based in Washington, published data showing that last year,

leading pharmaceutical companies spent more than twice as much money on

advertising, marketing and administration as they did on research into new

medicines.)

You have written: " One of the greatest marketing feats of the past 20 years is

use of pharmaceutical companies' dollars to convince the mass media that

psychiatrists who prescribe these companies' drugs are basing their treatment on

anything resembling science. " What do you mean by this?

Thirty years ago people used to laugh at psychiatry. Since then, the science has

not advanced, but the marketing on the part of pharmaceutical companies has.

Just like any other corporation, these companies bring out new models and new

brands; when people start to notice problems with one product, they bring out

another one which may not be any better than the last one, but its problems are

less well known. These are multibillion-dollar companies that have made sure

that professional organizations and consumer groups hear the same line over and

over again. Even lots of doctors don't have the time to do much more than read

press releases.

But today, even mainstream psychiatry textbooks will tell you that many of these

drugs have no benefit beyond the placebo effect, especially for children.

Meanwhile, estimates are as low as half a million to as high as 2 million

children are being put on these drugs, which may have no greater benefit than a

sugar pill.

All these new antidepressants -- Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft -- are SSRIs [selective

serotonin reuptake inhibitors]; they all increase the level of the

neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. The theory is that this increase fixes

depression.

But they've changed their theory every five or 10 years of which

neurotransmitter fixes depression. So if you look back 20 or 30 years, they were

talking about norepinephrine and that's why they were giving out things like

Tofranil and Elevil.

People debate whether they decided before or after Eli Lilly came out with

Prozac that serotonin was the key for depression. Now they've come out with

Wellbutrin -- and that affects only dopamine.

Part of the insanity of psychiatry is that not only is there no real scientific

evidence that psychotropic drugs are no better for depression than placebos, but

they certainly have a hell of a lot more side effects than sugar pills, and they

also mix these prescriptions together -- especially Wellbutrin and Effexor --

routinely.

Psychiatry textbooks admit that these new antidepressants are no more effective

than the older ones, but some of them do say that the side effects are less

severe. But that, also, is highly debatable.

What are some of the side effects that people taking SSRIs can expect?

What we know for sure is that patients who take Prozac and other SSRIs have

sexual difficulty. There is a debate as to how high these percentages go -- but

some people say it can be as high as 70 percent. Overall, what these drugs do is

anaesthetize you. They numb you. Some people like that feeling, just like some

people like to numb themselves with alcohol or other mood-altering drugs. For

them, it's like the drug soma, from " Brave New World. " But for some people,

taking a drug that makes them feel less is really scary.

For example, I have had patients on psychiatric drugs who have had genuine

tragedy occur in their lives -- a friend dies, or something like that -- and

they have reacted with a robotic response, or if not quite robotic, it's a

little less full than it would be otherwise. They have this basic feeling inside

that nothing is affecting them.

Another one of the great deceptions is what the drug companies like to call

" selective serotonin. " People believe that upping serotonin only will only

affect their depression. What they don't tell people is that serotonin is

everywhere in your body. So when you change the amount of serotonin in the

neurosynapses in your brain, you are also changing it in your cerebellum, in

your gastrointestinal tract. A lot of people have stomach problems when they are

taking these things. It affects your sleep cycles. There is almost no part of

your body that serotonin doesn't affect.

A lot of people have withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking these drugs. That

was another initial deception: They were trying to tell people that there would

be no addiction, and no withdrawal symptoms. That's totally not true. If you

take any kind of drug that affects your neurotransmitters, when you stop taking

it, your body will have to rebound. There are all kinds of withdrawal symptoms.

Their euphemism now is " discontinuation syndrome. "

Newspapers have told us quite a bit about the kind of psychiatric treatment

Yates was receiving. What kind of side effects might her treatment have

caused?

In the case of Yates, according to news reports, she was getting

Wellbutrin and also another antidepressant, Effexor. The news reports don't say

if she was getting them recently, but it's clear she was on both of them

sometime in the last couple of years. They all say she was pulled off this

antipsychotic Haldol. When people are taken off Haldol, they routinely become

really agitated, they feel completely out of control. Sometimes people can't

even keep food down; if they haven't eaten for a while, they often experience

dry heaving.

But if you add all three of these drugs together, they were playing with three

different neurotransmitters. Here's the interesting thing: The Wellbutrin ups

dopamine, the Effexor ups the serotonin and norepinephrine. You know what else

ups all three of those? It's called cocaine. If you want to be a one-stop

shopper, just go ahead and do cocaine. It's a little different, because cocaine

gives you a quicker hit, and these things take a little longer.

Haldol suppresses dopamine. If they were giving her the Wellbutrin at the same

time -- which is not clear from the news reports -- they were giving her another

drug that increased it. When people hear this sort of thing, they immediately

conclude that Yates must be the victim of malpractice. But this sort of

thing happens all the time. This is the standard of care, however illogical it

may sound.

How do you explain something like postpartum depression? Would you consider it a

chemical imbalance triggered by a physical act in the body, or a social

phenomenon brought on by the stress of raising a child? How best would you treat

it?

Some folks explain postpartum depression by saying that it is rooted in hormonal

changes. If that is your argument, then it would make sense that you would want

to treat it through drug therapy. But once people have labeled it as a chemical

imbalance, they start to treat it with all these psychiatric drugs when it

hasn't been proven that serotonin is the cause of these women's problems.

Not everyone will flip out like Yates, but for a certain percentage of

women who are particularly sensitive to these drugs, it may increase their

chances of having a psychotic break.

It's a given that these women who are going through this are having a really

hard time. They are down, they are really hurting. The issue is whether it is

helpful to create a syndrome for it. For some people, it may make them feel

better to know that there is a name for what they are going through, and it may

make it easier for them to explain their condition to other people.

The downside is not just the drugs and the side effects; it's also that these

people are missing out on what human beings are supposed to be doing when they

are going through this kind of situation. The No. 1 thing they should be doing

is supporting each other emotionally -- validating each other's feelings,

building some real trust among people. When you help someone get through a hard

time, that's how you build strong bonds and families and communities.

People would rather numb themselves with drugs than admit that we live in a

pretty weird society, one in which no one is really around to physically help

these women who find themselves suddenly the only person in charge of this kid.

Their husband is off at work, their friends have jobs. For some people, that can

be a pretty crazy situation. For 99.9 percent of the history of the human race,

no one ever raised a kid in that manner. When a child was born, the mother could

find plenty of emotional and physical support, and the burden was not resting

entirely on one person.

Over the last years, we have seen a huge increase in the number of syndromes.

The DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] is now the size

of a phone book. More people are diagnosed with depression than ever before. Are

there really this many new disorders? Or is this a social rather than a medical

phenomenon?

One way you can explain these increases is to look at the kind of marketing done

by the drug companies. But that's a little too easy. If it were all a complete

sham, you wouldn't see such a huge increase in true problems -- in the United

States, teen suicides have tripled since 1960; we have twice as many obese kids

as we did 30 years ago. No one is making that stuff up.

Psychiatry is part of the problem in that it is exploiting this situation, but

it is also diverting people from taking a true look at what is happening in the

culture to cause all of these problems. Our society is perhaps the most

economically successful culture in the history of the world, materially. But in

our one-dimensional quest for productivity, consumption and efficiency, we have

forgotten about a whole bunch of things that people need to stay human -- like

community, autonomy, diversity. All of those things have shrunk.

Taken together, this may help to explain why so many kids are being diagnosed

with attention deficit disorder and all these other various childhood disorders.

The largest increases we have seen in new illnesses are the ones that affect

children.

There are real problems out there: You do have kids taking guns to school, you

do have people like Yates, you do have this huge increase in people who

think they are in pretty bad shape. But why is this going on?

Is it going on because more people have chemical imbalances? No. It makes no

sense to believe that human beings can change biologically in one or two

generations. Obviously, something else has changed in our culture, in our

society.

But once you start looking at that, you have to start challenging the

assumptions of the status quo. And people at the top of society don't want to do

that. People who are at the top of institutional hierarchies who are doing quite

well don't want to look at that. People on the streets have no problem with what

I am saying. To them, it just sounds like common sense.

In general, you can either believe in numbing, or you can believe in healing.

It's very hard to do both. You can either believe in grieving over losses, or

you can believe in denying losses. You can believe in people supporting and

helping one another, that you don't have to have a Ph.D. or an M.D., that if

people care about each other that they can provide emotional and physical

support better than any so-called authorities. Or you can believe that unless

you have a degree or expertise that you can't help anybody.

Looking at the history of drugs that have been marketed to women, it seems that

you can make an argument that psychiatrists and drug companies are selecting for

socially desirable traits. For example, in the '50s, when women were supposed to

stay at home, Valium was the drug of choice. Today, the drug of choice is

Prozac. Are we medicating people to fit into society?

Back in the '50s and '60s, they wanted docile women. So if any woman was a

little more upset or assertive than average, she would be given librium or

Valium. Nowadays, we want good little consumers, we want good little workers. We

don't want women to be docile; we want them to be out there shopping and

working. So we don't want those old drugs anymore -- they make you sleepy, they

make you a little zoned out. But Prozac and Paxil seem perfect for the new woman

-- they just make you numb, but you can still shop and work when you are on

them.

Clearly, I don't think it's desirable. Part of having a human society is making

room for all kinds of people. You don't chemically alter them to make them fit

in. And it doesn't work. But that is exactly what they are trying to do --

especially to kids.

With kids, it's really obvious. One hundred years ago, 6 percent of kids

graduated from high school. During World War II, it was about 25 percent. Almost

nobody went to college. They worked on farms, they worked as apprentices.

Today, if you are a middle- to upper-middle-class parent and your kid doesn't go

to college, it means you are a failure as a parent. I work with kids all the

time. And some of the smartest kids I've ever had don't belong in college at

all. They just aren't academic types. But when teachers come to parents and say,

our kid is getting C's and D's, and they aren't interested in Shakespeare, the

parents start freaking out and thinking that their child will never get into

college, and never get a job.

We have created that. And that is what we, as a culture, don't want to admit:

We've created fewer and fewer places for different kinds of personalities to

feel good about themselves and to make a living.

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About the writer

Amy Benfer is associate editor of Life.

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