Squiatric medications have not significantly improved the treatment of mental illnesses and, in fact, they can be contributing to their increase
said American journalist and researcher Robert Whitaker (1952) in an interview with The day About his book Anatomy of an epidemic: magic bullets, psychiatric medications and the amazing increase in mental illnesses.
Published by the Editorial Seal Capital Swing, the work tells the story of how various pharmaceutical companies used the prestige of psychiatrists in academic centers to build the myth, without scientific foundation, that suffering such as depression, anxiety or schizophrenia were caused by chemical imbalances In the brain, making the public believe that drugs were the solution.
“The publication of the third edition of the Statistical Diagnostic Manual by the American Squiatry Association (DSM III) In 1980 the game changed, since it contributed to cement in public opinion the alleged link between mental illnesses and the lack of chemical substances in the brain. ”
Story of marketing
“Divorce, be fired, economic instability or family stress, problems that in the life of a person could cause emotional and psychological difficulties, since then they were classified as true diseases as well as other physical conditions, so it made sense that the Drugs were the frontline treatment. That story told to the public, more than scientist, was a story of marketing”Said the author.
Director of Publications of the Harvard Medicine School, George Polk Award for Medical Journalism in 1988 (one of the most respected in US journalism), a finalist at the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a series of articles co -written in the newspaper Boston Globe. The author’s resume would suffice to support his research itself, however scientific journalism is supported in evidence.
Proof of this are the statistical data that Whitaker provides in his work, such as the significant and accelerated increase of people disabled by mental illnesses in the United States since 1955, to the degree that today one in five Americans takes a psychiatric drug to daily. In 1987 there were a million 250 thousand people who received a provision of social security disability income (SSDI) due to a mental illness, while at present that number is at almost 4 million.
The author also stressed that this increase has also been observed in children, where mental illness has become the main cause of disability. “Initially, it was estimated that only 3 percent of that population presented behaviors that justified a diagnosis of attention deficit and hyperactivity deficit (ADHD).
However, with the relaxation of the measurement criteria in subsequent editions of the DSM III, one in 10 school -age children in the United States received this diagnosis, with the respective use of drugs to treat it, despite the fact that they are associated with a Wide list of adverse effects such as insomnia, headaches, depression, anxiety, irritability apathy, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, psychotic episodes, hallucinations and even the risk of sudden cardiac death.
Social conditions
By problematizing psychiatric or psychological conditions, individual solutions to the conflict are generally conceived, instead of questioning the social conditions that produce them. In this context, neoliberalism is necessarily framed, which at least in the United States has moved only for profit, leaving aside professional ethics and social accompaniment, the author said.
“The solution to these problems is always usually individual and tries to fix what is ‘bad’ in the head of the affected, although it is nothing more than an excuse for our capitalist society to continue without dedicating resources to improve the social conditions, or what we could call the social determinants of health today: access to good schools, dignified housing, healthy foods, significant work, decent salaries, etc. ”
He added the stigma associated with these conditions, and stressed that people diagnosed often face discrimination and contempt in society, especially in the workplace. He also pointed out that the lack of empathy of family and friends can further increase their suffering.
On the panorama of mental health care in the world, the author remarked that the current model of disease care, which from the US has been exported everywhere and promotes psychiatric drugs such as first -line therapy, has been a Failure at the social level
I think the majority of the American psychiatry is broken. The long -term results for patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder are remarkably worse than they were before 1980. There are dissident psychiatrists that are making significant criticisms of how this branch of medicine is practiced, but even these criticisms do not They seem to be changing attention in a positive direction, which would imply a greater emphasis on the provision of psychosocial care that helps people repair their lives
he concluded.