BJP Announces “The End of the Psychopharmacological Revolution”

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The editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, in a comment on Morrison et al.’s “Antipsychotics: is it Time to Introduce Patient Choice,” announces “the time has now come to call an end to the psychopharmacological revolution of 1952… The combination of extrapyramidal symptoms, dangers of tardive dyskinesia and the neuromalignant syndrome, weight gain and the metabolic syndrome, sedation, postural hypotension, and interference in sexual function … would need to be offset by massive symptomatic and social functioning improvement to make the benefit/risk ratio positive.” The editor proposes an equal place for environmental and psychological with pharmacological strategies.

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Kermit Cole
Kermit Cole
Kermit Cole, MFT, founding editor of Mad in America, works in Santa Fe, New Mexico as a couples and family therapist. Inspired by Open Dialogue, he works as part of a team and consults with couples and families that have members identified as patients. His work in residential treatment — largely with severely traumatized and/or "psychotic" clients — led to an appreciation of the power and beauty of systemic philosophy and practice, as the alternative to the prevailing focus on individual pathology. A former film-maker, he has undergraduate and master's degrees in psychology from Harvard University, as well as an MFT degree from the Council for Relationships in Philadelphia. He is a doctoral candidate with the Taos Institute and the Free University of Brussels. You can reach him at [email protected].

13 COMMENTS

  1. How nice that the British psychiatric establishment now says the risk/benefit ratio of antipsychotics might be unfavorable.

    How about admitting that what their profession has done is ruin hundreds of thousands of lives?

    How about admitting that their profession has been a total failure in its supposed mission?

    Cloaked in this guarded academic language is the same old arrogance and amorality. Do the people reading this really think that any real change in the way people in emotional distress are treated is going to come from the same people who are responsible for these abuses in the first place?

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    • There are people who write for this very website who believe that real change is going to come from slicing up dead rat brains. People who claim to be critics of the medical model, who believe in slicing up dead rats to prove people with the schizophrenia label are diseased is research worth of great respect.

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  4. They’ll come up with something else. If there is something that has been a constant with the psychiatric establishment is their ability to fabricate scams that supersede the old ones. Typically, the evilness of their new quackeries is always an order of magnitude worse than that of the older ones. So while I find relief in that some voices within the establishment are calling for a end to pharmacopsychiatry I am fearful about their next scam.

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  5. About time too: somebody from the establishment pipes up and says it loud and clear. I believe in change even if the change won’t happen over night.First of all what gets taught in medical school needs to change.

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