Psychiatric Drugs

The crash last week of the Germanwings plane has shocked many. In view of the apparent mental health record of the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, questions have been asked about the screening policies of airlines. The focus has generally been on the conditions pilots may have or the arguments they might be having with partners or other situational factors that might make them unstable. Even when the issue of the medication a pilot may be taking is raised, it is in the context of policies that permit pilots to continue on drugs like antidepressants to ensure any underlying conditions are effectively treated. But fewer treatments in medicine are effective in this sense than people might think and even when effective they come with effects that need to be balanced against the likely effects of the underlying condition.

The German pilot who apparently deliberately crashed a passenger plane reportedly had antidepressant drugs in his home, use of which is restricted or disallowed by many aviation regulators.

The majority of people taking antidepressant medications have never had major depressive disorder, and 38% have never met criteria for having any mental disorder.

Antipsychotic medications that are commonly being used to help control behaviors in elderly people with dementia seem to be causing premature deaths at high rates.

I am a psychiatric survivor of over thirty-six years. Since my nervous breakdown in 1978, I have undergone multitudinous experiences ranging from the subtly humiliating to the horrifically debilitating at the hands of incompetent psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists who, in the name of medicine, did more harm than good.

About 17% of college students take stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall, primarily because they believe the drugs will help them improve their academic performance.

-A psychiatric study widely hailed in Swedish media which led to new treatment guidelines was a "fraud," states health reporter and researcher Janne Larsson.

A third of patients who have taken the common psychiatric medication lithium for over ten years have developed "chronic renal failure" from the drug.

-On a list of prescription drugs that generated the most in global sales dollars in 2014, the antipsychotic Abilify was number twelve at $5.7 billion.

Somewhere along the line we have lost the understanding that kids come in all shapes and sizes. Some kids are active, some are quiet; some kids are dreamers, others are daring; some kids are dramatic, others are observers; some impulsive, others reserved; some leaders, others followers; some athletic, others thinkers. Where did we ever get the notion that kids should all be one way?

A literature review found that the extensive off-label use of antipsychotic medications in nursing homes is causing many adverse effects and providing limited benefits.

This is the second of a series of excerpts from Cracked Open, a book whose unintentional beginning came after I became physically dependent on Ativan in 2010. After a year of following my doctor’s orders for daily use to treat insomnia, my body and mind began to fall apart. I’m serializing the book here – before sending it out into the world – because MIA became a lighthouse for me. I want this community’s feedback because I want to help make a difference. I want my words and message to be clear and strong.

Pneumonia cases in the elderly are strongly associated with use of anticholinergic medications, including benzodiazepines and tricyclic antidepressants.

Thirty-one US states have implemented some kind of "prior authorization" policies to try to rein in the unnecessary prescribing of antipsychotic medications to children.

Clinicians are following best practice guidelines only half of the time when giving antipsychotic medications to children, and following FDA-approved indications only one-fourth of the time.

The FDA has approved the atypical antipsychotic Saphris (asenapine) for use in children on the basis of one trial.

-New York Magazine discusses two recent studies that looked at the long-term relationships between use of psychedelics and the development of mental illnesses.

-Roy Poses critically analyzes the research and concludes that "uncritical media reports that parroted drug company executives" have led to "overenthusiastic promotion of the latest wonder drug."

Increasing numbers of children with sleep disorders are being treated with the hormone melatonin, but the medication has not been approved for such use.

In a commentary published in the University of Ottawa nursing journal Aporia, Paula Caplan writes about how Allen Frances and two other academic psychiatrists...

Instead of hope and enthusiasm for their futures, too many children now grow up believing they are inherently defective, and controlled by bad genes and biochemical imbalances. They are shackled by the idea that they have ADHD and then subdued by the drugs that inevitably go along with the diagnosis. Unless something intervenes, many of them will go on to pass their days on Earth in a drug-impaired, demoralized state.

The chair of a state Senate committee told a public hearing that California’s foster care system “has grown more addicted to mind-altering medication."

-The Wall Street Journal asks why some 274,000 infants and 370,000 toddlers in the US are taking antianxiety sedatives and antidepressant drugs.

A jury decided Johnson & Johnson must pay a Philadelphia man $2.5 million in damages "for failing to warn that its Risperdal antipsychotic could cause gynecomastia."

In 2010, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica published a study by Göran Isacsson et al.  The paper was titled Antidepressant medication prevents suicide in depression. It's a complicated article, with some tenuous logic, but, in any event, it's all moot, because the article was retracted by the authors and by Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica about sixteen months after publication.  The retraction had been requested by the authors because of "… unintentional errors in the analysis of the data …"