Tag: psychiatric medication

I thought I would make a small contribution to the discussion about how coverage of the recent airline tragedy focuses so much on the supposed ‘mental illness’ of the pilot and not so much on the possible role of antidepressants. Of course we will never know the answer to these questions but it is important, I think, to combat the simplistic nonsense wheeled out after most such tragedies, the nonsense that says the person had an illness that made them do awful things. So, just to confirm what many recipients of antidepressants, clinicians and researchers have been saying for a long time, here are some findings from our recent New Zealand survey of over 1,800 people taking anti-depressants, which we think is the largest survey to date.

Evidence based care is supposed to drive up standards, ensure uniformity, establish best practice, guide clinicians and protect patients. This should be celebrated. Instead, evidence-based mental health is openly disparaged, and when psychiatrists don’t get the results they want, they ignore them, suppress them, or denounce them. These attitudes have repercussions on the training of psychiatrists.

Since I left the psychiatric prescribing trenches and came south for the winter, I’ve been staying in a beach town within driving distance of a technology metropolis. I take breaks from my writing and walk to the beach. There, I meet and talk with the winners of the American dream. They are intelligent, highly educated and financially successful. They take their beach vacations here.

Psychiatrists at the University of Minnesota forced a young man into a profitable study of antipsychotic drugs over the objections of his mother, who desperately warned that his condition was deteriorating and that he was in danger of killing himself. On May 8, 2004, Mary Weiss' only son, Dan Markingson, committed suicide. A petition to the governor of Minnesota now asks for an investigation.

This is the second in my new series, “Haiku for social change”, the first having appeared on my own blog page. Since this piece is about pharmacology and psychopharmacology, I think MIA is a good home for it.

I do not understand how we can continue to avoid the conversation about psychiatric medications and their role in the violence that is affecting far too many of our children, whether Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Kip Kinkel, or Jeff Weise (all of whom were either taking or withdrawing from psychotropic medications) or the scores of children and adults they have killed and harmed. It is not clear what role medications played in the Newtown tragedy, though news reports are now suggesting there is one.

My sabattical of last winter has spun off a second one. I remain uncertain of my role as a physician in a society which values pills over personal growth and change. Last summer, unplugging my life from the “American dream” seemed in order. It’s not easy to make changes with chains and weights in place. It’s not easy to think, decide and move with the financial shackles that are the bones of everyday life.

The suicide of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota has brought notoriety to the CAFÉ study and its site investigators, Stephen Olson and Charles Schulz. But the “corrective action” recently issued by the Minnesota Board of Social Work against the CAFÉ study coordinator, Jean Kenney, has raised another disturbing question.

I was recently talking with a young man about his anxiety, which he experiences as extreme.  When I asked him what the anxiety was...

I believe the question of whether to medicate or not cannot be kept separate from the question of whether or not to consider individuals...

Although the drive to the psychiatric hospital in White Plains, New York, in September 2004 was a mere fifteen minutes from home, the trip...

There I was on my first night of Outward Bound, lying under the big Texas sky in a little town called Redford, amidst waxy...

By January of my junior year in college, I had reached my first true emotional bottom. Though surrounded by people on a daily basis...

Frantic, fearful, and desperate to get my life together, I returned to Cambridge in the middle of August to move into my off-campus apartment....

Upon arriving home at the end of sophomore year in college, which had been devoted to hyper-control and a carefully maintained, entirely black-and-white existence,...

Subtly and insidiously, my medications, once merely inert composites of chemicals, acquired an agency of their own and took center stage in my life...

At no moment in my childhood-- whether in those weekday hours after school spent exploring the woods with my dog, or on the early...

A newfound acceptance of my bipolar diagnosis during the winter of my freshman year at Harvard filled me to the brim with a sense...

On the day I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 2001, I dropped my belongings in my dorm room, said...

When I returned to boarding school in the fall of my junior year, I brought with me not just duffel bags of clothes, athletic...

I settled into my new life in the fall of my sophomore year at a co-ed boarding school in Western Massachusetts and was convinced...

Note: In this third entry, it is still early on in my story. It is the fall of my ninth grade year, I am...

Soon after awakening to my crisis of ‘self’, I was sent to my first therapist. My social circles had changed, and I’d begun to...

This blog is an attempt to make sense of what brought me into the world of psychiatry as a child and of where it...