From Mad in the Netherlands: In the article “ Pill shame in psychiatry is a serious social problem“, the unified board of the NPF lashes out at anyone who disagrees with them, including professionals, user organizations and patients. The NPF says that criticism of psychotropic drugs causes patients to feel ashamed of taking those kinds of drugs for mental disorders. Contrary to what the Norwegian Psychiatry Association claims, the problem is not ‘pill shame’, but that psychiatric patients often cannot say ‘no’ to medication, even if the medication doesn’t work for them. For many, that ineffective medication with serious side effects is the only treatment they receive. This “problem of shame” cannot therefore be solved by providing unilateral information about the excellence of medicines. It requires honest information and an open debate.
Read the full article here and the English translation here.
And the psychiatrists piece of misinformation ostensibly an educational effort omits correcting the missunderstanding of the effect of psychiatric medications: they say it has not been proven it causes addcition or it has no mechanism to do that, when in educational honesty they should have said the proper term is DEPENDECY not addiction.
Seems to me an omission of the bad faith kind.
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It also always seems hypocritical when they expect someone ELSE to prove their drugs cause dependency, assuming safety, while normally we expect drug trials to assume non-safety until proven otherwise. How many drugs have we been told are “not habit forming” and yet later turned out to have horrible addiction profiles? Benzedrine, Valium, Xanax, Oxy, Ativan, SSRIs… the list is pretty long at this point. Why aren’t we making the drug companies prove their drugs are NOT addictive/dependence-forming before they’re allowed to market?
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I agree, not said but, the pharma industry is answering only to it’s stockholders and the next quarter bonus.
But, well, decades ago I talked to a biostatistician at a prestitgious US university, and he said that safety studies when it came to drug approvals usually required larger studies than your avergage 1,000-10,000 patients. For statistical significance.
Given that new drugs passed the animal studies, mutagenic/carcinogenic, and small clinical/safety studies phases.
This was before the replication crises, with an E, the publication bias, the SSRIs negative studies unpublishing, the frauds, omissions and misspresentations, etc.
It was when a big private pharma lab finding out that most, at least half, basic published research that guided this individual big pharma drug development, i.e. drug lead and discovery, were published as fake.
They spent a lot of dollars to replicate basic studies that they could not replicate and cost this particular big pharma lab a lot of money on bogus drug discovery leads. They did it because apparently the drug targets were useless, and wasted money pursuing them…
That was around the 2000. That was told to several graduates on a research seminar at a pharma centered US university, as a don’t ask don’t tell.
The biggest problem is psychiatry is far worse than other biomedical research endeavours.
The whole thing of psychopharmacology is just uuuugh!, to me it has been for at least 30yrs!.
So, to sum up, in theory harms by drugs are not picked up in clinical studies of drugs that get approved, as per the biostatisticians arguments, since they are supposed to be somewhat safe before big clinical EFFECTIVENESS studies are done.
But in psychiatry it is whole other enchilada. Safety is not a consideration when cohersion and even worse fakery is at stake.
The studies targeted for replication back then, I imagine had to do with biochemistry, molecular biology, cells, maybe tissues, not human whole brains, as per the psychiatrists to my mind deluded hypotheses.
And that was before spin, fakery, concealment, publishing bias, outcome bias, fraud, etc., came into the public light.
So, not that suprising, given the Kuhnsian evolution of science.
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