Psychiatric drugs too often subvert recovery of patients

A letter to the editor of the News Sentinel by Steve De Santo, a resident of Fort Wayne.

Get ready for a shock!

Bob Caylor began a March 1 editorial with a seemingly innocent and forthright statement: “A majority of Americans think psychiatric medications can help people with mental illnesses, but many fewer would take such drugs themselves.” Interestingly, he said he spoke for the entire editorial board and based the article on a report from the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research.

Well, I visited the Web site of this Indiana consortium. And I found something intriguing and disturbing, an article titled: $3.5 Million NIH Grant Funds International Study of Mental Health Stigma.

The first paragraph refers to a massive mental health study carried out over several years by the World Health Organization that talked about how more people in third-world countries recover from mental illnesses like schizophrenia and depression than in “developed” countries like ours. The article goes on: “This surprising fact, confirmed by numerous medical studies by the World Health Organization and other groups, has led to much debate about why more advanced systems of mental health treatment get worse results.”

This disparity is not a mystery. The $3.5 million grant to study stigma associated with mental illness is a huge waste of your tax dollars. I’ll tell you why. Robert Whitaker, back in 2002, explained this very issue in his book, “Mad in America.” He said there was “a variable” in the World Health Organization’s own data that explained the huge difference in outcomes and then went into detail that I’ll summarize.

“Doctors in poor countries generally did not keep their mad patients on neuroleptics, while doctors in the rich countries did,” he wrote. The percentage of patients who got well in poor countries and those that got well in rich countries like the U.S. correlated very closely with the percentages who did not continue on their neuroleptic drugs. As Whitaker emphasized, “Certainly if the correlation had gone the other way, with routine drug use associated with much better outcomes, Western psychiatry would have taken a bow and given credit to its scientific potions. . . .

“Even before the 1992 WHO report, American researchers had reason to think that there would be such a correlation. In 1987, Courtenay Harding, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, reported on the long-term outcomes of 82 chronic schizophrenics discharged from Vermont State Hospital in the late 1950s.

She had found that one-third of this cohort had recovered completely. And as she made clear in subsequent publications, the patients in this best-outcomes group shared one common factor: They all had successfully weaned themselves from neuroleptics. Hers was the best, most ambitious long-term study that had been conducted in the United States in recent times. The notion that schizophrenics needed to stay on medication all their lives, she’d concluded, was a myth.”

Dr. Peter Breggin is another expert who believes this. Check out his Web site, www.breggin.com, to begin your re-education on mental-health issues. Or open his recent paperback, “The Antidepressant Fact Book,” and read unsettling chapter titles such as “Damaging the Brain with SSRI Antidepressants,” “Depression and Suicide Caused by Antidepressants,” “Criminal Behavior and Violence Caused by Antidepressants” and “Withdrawal Problems When Stopping Antidepressants.”

Let’s start educating ourselves by reading experts not in the back pocket of Big Pharma, which has billions to lose if its pills stop selling.