Why We Need Different Approaches
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It is fairly universally accepted that America's mental
health system is a failure. At
great public expense, our current mental health system's ubiquitous deployment
of psychiatric drugs, including forcing them into unwilling patients,
dramatically worsens outcomes and suffering.
Since the introduction of the so-called miracle drug
Thorazine in the mid-1950's the disability rate of people diagnosed with serious
mental illness has increased more than seven-fold.[1]
We now see a recovery rate
of only 5% for those people who are maintained on neuroleptics.[2]
This is far worse than
anything seen before the advent of the neuroleptics in the mid-1950's.
It has been shown, however,
that if we try to avoid the use of neuroleptics when people experience their
first break from consensus reality a nearly 80% recovery rate can be achieved.
The below chart shows results from the "Open Dialogue" program in
Northern Finland in which they avoid the use of neuroleptics if possible.
Similar results were
achieved during the Soteria-House study in the 1970's conducted by Loren Mosher,
MD, who was Chief of Schizophrenia Research at the National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH) at the time.
What we find is the
recovery rate of people who get off of neuroleptics after they have been on them
for a while goes from 5% to 40%.
While this is 8 times better than staying on them (40% vs.
5%), it is half of what can be achieved by avoiding the use of neuroleptics in
the first place as established by the Open Dialogue and Soteria House studies,
both of which achieved close to an 80% recovery rate.[3]
This
demonstrates the importance of avoiding the use of neuroleptics if at all
possible. In addition to their
lives being so much better, allowing 16 times more people to recover not only
saves a tremendous amount of treatment expense, it converts people who would
otherwise be receiving life-long publicly paid services and transfer payments
into productive, taxpaying citizens.
[4]
In addition to dramatically reducing the recovery rate, the
ubiquitous use of psychiatric drugs reduce the lifespan of people diagnosed with
serious mental illness in the public mental illness system by 20-25 years.[5]
We should and can do better.
[1] The charts are from talks given
by award winning journalist, Robert Whitaker, author of
Anatomy of an Epidemic
and
Mad in America, including
his July 16, 2021, talk to the Soteria Network in the UK, "Soteria Past,
Present, and Future: The Evidence For This Model of Care," available on
YouTube at
https://youtu.be/UXe2dgBF70w.
This one hour talk is highly recommended.
[2] Marketed
as "antipsychotics" even though they don't have anti-psychotic effects
for most.
[3] While there might not be a 100%
overlap between the 80% who recovered and the 80% who were not taking
the neuroleptics long term, clearly minimizing the use of the
neuroleptics produce dramatically better outcomes.
[4] The best book to understand the
impact of psychiatric drugs in general, not just the neuroleptics, is
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic
Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness
in America, by Robert Whitaker, from whose work the foregoing is
largely drawn.
[5]
See, various studies at
http://psychrights.org/Research/Digest/NLPs/neuroleptics.htm
and
Morbidity and Mortality in People with Serious Mental Illness,
by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors,
October 2006. |