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Whitaker Interview

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I have just found this interview with Whitaker. It seems that psychiatry is causing great harm on an uninmaginable scale. How could these doctors be so uncaring and willing to cause so much suffering and distress. Psychiatrists are already saying that Whitaker is sensationalising his book to rack up sales, but we know who will win the argument with the public, and then the doctors will be able to go on and destroy the lives of the next few million people who go to them for help. Everyone trusts the doctor. Here's an extract:

Whitaker: The rise in the disability rate due to mental illness is simply the starting point for the book. The disability numbers don't prove anything, but, given that this astonishing increase has occurred in lockstep with our society's increased use of psychiatric medications, the numbers do raise an obvious question. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling the increase in disability rates? And in order to investigate that question, you need to look at two things. First, do psychiatric medications alter the long-term course of mental disorders for the better, or for the worse? Do they increase the likelihood that a person will be able to function well over the long-term, or do they increase the likelihood that a person will end up on disability? Second, is it possible that a person with a mild disorder may have a bad reaction to an initial drug, and that puts the person onto a path that can lead to long-term disability. For instance, a person with a mild bout of depression may have a manic reaction to an antidepressant, and then is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on a cocktail of medications. Does that happen with any frequency? Could that be an iatrogenic [physician-caused illness] pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability rates?

Now there may be various cultural factors contributing to the increase in the number of disabled mentally ill in our society. But the outcomes literature — and this really is a tragic story — clearly shows that our drug-based paradigm of care is a primary cause.

Let me give a specific example. When you research the rise of juvenile bipolar illness in this country, you see that it appears in lockstep with the prescribing of stimulants for ADHD and antidepressants for depression. Prior to the use of those medications, you find that researchers reported that manic-depressive illness, which is what bipolar illness was called at the time, virtually never occurred in prepubertal children. But once psychiatrists started putting "hyperactive" children on Ritalin, they started to see prepubertal children with manic symptoms. Same thing happened when psychiatrists started prescribing antidepressants to children and teenagers. A significant percentage had manic or hypomanic reactions to the antidepressants. Thus, we see these two iatrogenic pathways to a juvenile bipolar diagnosis documented in the medical literature. And then what happens to the children and teenagers who end up with this diagnosis? They are now put on heavier-duty drugs and often on a drug cocktail, and you find that they do poorly on that treatment. You find that a high percentage end up "rapid cyclers," which means they have severe "bipolar" symptoms, and that they can now be expected to be chronically ill throughout their lives. We also know that the atypical antipsychotics [such as Risperdal and Zyprexa] prescribed to bipolar children cause a host of physical problems, and there is pretty good evidence that they cause cognitive decline over the long term. When you add up all this information, you end up documenting a story of how the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in the United States have been destroyed in this way. In fact, I think that the number of children and teenagers that have ended up "bipolar" after being treated with a stimulant or an antidepressant is now well over one million. This is a story of harm done on an unimaginable scale.

http://psychiatricnews.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/robert-whitaker-interview/

And now millions of PSSD sufferers can be added to the list of people who have had their lives destroyed by these doctors and their poison.

Kaivey

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