Are Psychiatric Medications Hurting More Patients Than They Help? (scientificamerican.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American's Cross-Check blog: Two new posts on this website have me contemplating, once again, the terrible possibility that psychiatry is hurting more people than it helps. Reporter Sarah G. Miller notes in "1 in 6 Americans Takes a Psychiatric Drug" that prescriptions for mental illness keep surging. As of 2013, almost 17 percent of Americans were taking at least one psychiatric drug, up from 10 percent in 2011, according to a new study. "Antidepressants were the most common type of psychiatric drug in the survey, with 12 percent of adults reporting that they filled prescriptions for these drugs..."

This increase in medications must be boosting our mental health, right? Wrong. In "Is Mental Health Declining in the U.S.?," Edmund S. Higgins, professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina, acknowledges the "inconvenient truth" that Americans' mental health has, according to some measures, deteriorated...
It's all more evidence of something their blogger wrote in 2012. "American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, may be perpetrating the biggest case of iatrogenesis -- harmful medical treatment -- in history."

Comments

Of course not.

[ilsaloving]

The balance sheets for the various drug companies clearly state that everything is just fine.

Re:Of course not.

[Bite The Pillow]

Oh, good, pseudo intellectual cynicism has dismissed the whole topic. No need to discuss this, ilsaloving has seen through all of the smoke bombs and has clearly articulated the fundamental explanation.

Enjoy the karma boost you get from people who only want to reward opinions matching their own.

Re:Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is damn complicated, which an overwhelming number of variables. Looking at only two variables: a rise in depression and a rise in antidepressant drug use, is criminally unscientific.

I see a lot of in-recent-decades cultural shifts that can easily explain a rise in depression. For example, once upon a time one could get married and have a reasonable expectation of remaining married until death. These days, the divorce revolution has left enormous numbers of adults alone and lonely, and kids being raised in broken homes. The dating world is characterized by selfishness and manipulation rather than long-term mate seeking.

Revelations about how the government has been betraying our trust is leaving everyone without faith in their leaders.

The ongoing elimination of the middle class is pushing ever greater numbers of people down into the lower classes, with no realistic hope of climbing up.

Why would anyone expect depression rates to go down in an environment like this?

Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[Alsn]

In happiness charts, Denmark continues to score the highest while they also have the highest prescription rate of antidepressants in the world.

Not saying Denmark is some shining beacon of mental health but the problem is quite simply harder to diagnose than to correlate psychiatric drug prescriptions and mental health stats. More serious studies are definitely needed.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[bmo]

Maybe it's because in Denmark, you can go to school and get a stipend on top of it. Also, there isn't a race-to-the-bottom with wages. Also, there is a social and medical safety net.

And bars don't close at 1am like they do here.

--
BMO

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[Princeofcups]

Maybe it's because in Denmark, you can go to school and get a stipend on top of it. Also, there isn't a race-to-the-bottom with wages. Also, there is a social and medical safety net.

And bars don't close at 1am like they do here.

--
BMO

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

This shows again a COMPLETE lack of understanding mental health. Sure there is a social component. But the drugs are not meant to deal with that. That's what therapy is for. Drugs are used to mitigate a lack of certain neurochemicals in the brain, a PHYSICAL condition. Without a proper balance of serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc., normal everyday functioning can become impossible. The main issue is when MD's without psychiatric training started prescribing these drugs. "Try this and come back in two weeks" can work with a rash, but not with mental health. Finding the right drugs titrated at the right dosages requires direct interaction between patient and doctor, and probably therapy to understand the social and mental effects of the underlying physical issues.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[bmo]

And how do you propose to fix society so it's not a "shit heap?" Extra points if you can also figure out what we should do with people with mental disorders until you "fix society?" How are you going to make it that nobody is in a bad relationship, loses their job, has a catastrophic medical event that significantly impacts their daily lives, and nobody experiences inconsolable grief over someone close to them dying?

Oh hay, it's a false dichotomy /and/ a straw-man argument all in one!

You can improve society so that when things like you posted don't harm people /as much/ as they do today. It's a spectrum, not a binary state.

Improve availability of education
Relax or eliminate victimless-crime statutes
Social safety net - losing a job should not be life or family-threatening.
Medical safety net - Universal healthcare, like the rest of the developed nations have.
Decent infrastructure so companies can thrive instead of their trucks being dumped in a river because a bridge collapsed, for example.
Mandatory vacation time > 1.5 weeks USians
Enforce labor laws.

All of these things contribute to societal and mental health. But we can't have that /here/ because that's SOCIALIZUM!#@$!@#$@#$!

Come back when you get a clue.

--
BMO

Don't be fooled by the words "Scientific American"

[bluegutang]

This piece is written by a kook who frequently writes on various "spiritual" and pseudoscientific topics. Among his recent posts:

Seeing the Miracle of Existence in the Darkest of Times
Does Evolution Have a "Higher Purpose"?
Astrophysicist Says Experiments Might Soon Reveal Dark Matter's "True Nature"
What Would a Machine as Smart as God Want?
My Doubts about Deepak Chopra and the Monetization of Meditation
World's Smartest Physicist Thinks Science Can't Crack Consciousness
The Mind–Body Problem, Scientific Regress and "Woo"
Dear "Skeptics," Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More

True to form, this article's point is a passive-agressive claim based on absence of evidence:
"Like most psychiatrists, Higgins does not consider the possibility that medications might be contributing to the decline of mental health."

Actually, I'm sure most psychiatrists HAVE considered this possibility, and they follow the peer-reviewed evidence which concludes the opposite.

If anyone wants to argue with this scientific consensus, they are welcome to do their own peer-reviewed studies. But this article and its sources haven't.

Pimping drugs for profit

[geekmux]

"Antidepressants were the most common type of psychiatric drug in the survey..."

Last two times I've visited my general practitioner I was given a "new" form to fill out that essentially tried to convince me I was depressed; I was visiting for a cough and my yearly physical, neither of which had fuck-all to do with depression, but they sure as shit were trying like hell to get me on medication for it.

We have the same industry to thank for the opiate/heroin epidemic as well. How fucking ironic the drug pimps addicting America are marketed to "help" us. Perhaps it's time we actually start putting health over profits.

Series of tubes

[sjukfan]

You know when a non techie talk about the Internet as a series of tubes? This is one of those times but about psychiatric meds.

First off, of course it's wrong if you take meds so you can handle the stress of two full time jobs or assume you can just take a couple of pills and your depression will be gone.

But for most people out there with a psychiatric condition meds and therapy (and some more therapy) is a life saver. The meds will remove some of the symptoms so you can live an almost normal life while therapy helps with the cause for them. A depression is nothing like feeling a bit under the weather, a panic disorder does not go away with a gluten free diet, and grave OCD is as easy to just hold in as Ipecac

Re:Good question

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a Scientologist!

Re: Duh.

[BarbaraHudson]

But the drugs just takes care of the symptoms to some extent. Not the cause. We need to dig deeper.

Kind of hard to dig deeper if the person is overwhelmed by the symptoms. If someone wants to kill themselves today, you don't want to risk taking 3 months of therapy to try to get to the bottom of their problems. Also, finding the cause doesn't necessarily fix everything. The brain is plastic. Every time a person goes through a bout of depression, it increases the odds of another bout irrespective of the cause.

Re:One giant leap...

[Billly Gates]

I have numerous issues created by just 3 months on Celexia. I am changed, asexual, and developed drinking and financial problems that were not present before medication. Also I have been off the meds for 4 months I may add and will never know if I will return to my normal self again.

There is a whole site called survingantideppressents.com

Psychiatric medications are awesome

[scourfish]

I suffer from anxiety and depression that runs in my family. I used to be afraid to enter a building if there were other people in it, this invisible wall kept me from doing things I enjoyed, and I would often feel worthless, despite having a decent lifestyle with what could only be described as first world problems. Anxiety attacks that felt like either a heart attack or this sense of impending death occured almost every day. These do not occur due to some sort of emotional trigger. I tried exercise, eating healthy, and relaxing. There was some benefit, but nothing that stopped the anxiety attacks. Sertraline has been life changing for me. I'm able to go outside, I'm less nervous in large groups or around strangers, and I'm more accepting of both my gifts and my shortcoming. I haven't had an anxiety attack for years. I don't miss having one. The only major side effect is that I have to pee a lot, and I get nauseous if I miss a dose, but I'm willing to make that trade off. I wish I could go back in time and reclaim 10 more years prior to starting zoloft. I recommend that critics of psychiatric medication watch Stephen Fry's "The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive" or listen to the experiences of people who rely on those medications before making blanket statements of "useless" or some conspiratorial claim.