Part of a much longer report seen in the Huffington Post
The author tries to play fair with both sides, but ends up making a muddle of it.
Last month, the news broke that the anti-psychotic Abilify, thanks in part to direct marketing to consumers for depression, has become the best-selling drug in the United States, raking in roughly $7 billion a year. Yet as Jay Michaelson in The Daily Beast pointed out recently, no one's sure how it may achieve its purported effects as an "augmented" treatment for depression.
The alarms about the dangerous and sometimes deadly side-effects of antipsychotics affecting children and the elderly, among others, have been mounting for years. But only very recently have mainstream health officials in the United States and in Britain started to express concerns about these medications, with limited efforts, for example, to rein in their overuse in nursing homes. At the same time, there's a rethinking underway at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), U.K.'s National Health Service and the British Psychological Society (BPS) over the way clinicians diagnose schizophrenia and treat the illness over the long term with antipsychotics. In late November, for instance, the respected BPS released an updated study, "Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia," that offers a sweeping challenge to conventional thinking and treatments for schizophrenia.
[...]
The rest of us should be concerned about these trends, too. Nearly one in four visits to a psychiatrist for anxiety will lead to a prescription for an antipsychotic, an "off-label" use not approved by the FDA. What's happened is that the risky anti-psychotics originally intended for schizophrenia, then later approved for bipolar disorder, have seen their use extend to bipolar grade-schoolers and adult depressives with the dubious blessing of a pro-Pharma FDA, often based on shaky science. Now about 85 percent of all antipsychotic prescriptions are for "off-label" uses still unapproved by the easygoing FDA, such as anxiety and insomnia.
[...]
The commonly-hyped notion of an imbalance of chemicals -- especially serotonin -- causing depression, for instance, has largely been discredited in recent research. There is no single biological marker yet found for depression or other mental illnesses, but there are enough indicators showing that biology doubtless plays a key role -- although not yet precisely determined or quantified -- in mental illness. These include studies of identical twins; neural imaging studies highlighting malfunctioning brain activity; and research into abnormal brain development. That research has helped to spur a new federal "brain initiative."
[...]
Now, important recent reports reinforce mounting concerns about the long-term use of antipsychotics and the potential benefits of at least considering using lower dosages. Even the director of NIMH, Dr. Tom Insel, citing recent research about long-term outcomes in JAMA Psychiatry and other journals, has raised questions about these medications
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