Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs (eBook)

I have written this book to help patients, and when I decided to write it, one of my tentative titles was, “Listening to the voices of patients.” Most people I have talked to about mental health issues, be it my family, friends, colleagues, sports partners, filmmakers, gardeners, cleaners, waiters and hotel receptionists, have had bad experiences with psychiatry or know someone that have.

Coming from a background of being a specialist in internal medicine, which is entirely different, it slowly dawned on me how harmful psychiatry is. It takes years of close study to find out that psychiatry does vastly more harm than good,1 and my own research has contributed to revealing this.

My findings resonate closely with what the general public have concluded based on their own experiences. A survey of 2,031 Australians showed that people thought that depression pills (usually called antidepressants), psychosis pills (usually called antipsychotics), electroshock and admission to a psychiatric ward were more often harmful than beneficial.2 The social psychiatrists who had done the survey were dissatisfied with the answers and argued that people should be trained to arrive at the “right opinion.”

In early 1992, the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists, in association with the Royal College of General Practitioners, launched a five-year “Defeat Depression Campaign.”3 Its aim was to provide public education about depression and its treatment in order to encourage earlier treatment-seeking and reduce stigma. Campaign activities included newspaper and magazine articles, television and radio interviews, press conferences, production of leaflets, factsheets in ethnic minority languages, audio cassettes, a self-help video and two books.4 When 2,003 lay people were surveyed just before the launch of the campaign, 91% thought that people with depression should be offered counselling; only 16% thought they should be offered depression pills; only 46% said they were effective; and 78% regarded them as addictive.3 The psychiatrists’ view on these responses was that, “Doctors have an important role in educating the public about depression and the rationale for antidepressant treatment. In particular, patients should know that dependence is not a problem with antidepressants.”

When challenged about the fact that the colleges had accepted donations from all the major manufacturers of depression pills for the campaign, the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Robert Kendall, acknowledged that, “One of their major motives was the hope that an increased recognition of depressive illnesses both by the general public and by general practitioners would result in increased sales for them.”5 He didn’t say what the companies’ other major motives were. I doubt there were any. Money is the only motive drug companies have.

The psychiatrists embarked on their re-education campaign. But people were not easily convinced that they were wrong. A 1998 paper reported that changes were of the order of only 5-10% and that depression pills were still being regarded as addictive and less effective than counselling.4 Interestingly, 81% of the lay people agreed that, “Depression is a medical condition like other illnesses” and 43% ascribed depression to biological changes in the brain, but most people nonetheless ascribed it to social causes like bereavement (83%), unemployment (83%), financial problems (82%), stress (83%), loneliness/ isolation (79%) and divorce/ end of relationship (83%).4 Something didn’t add up.

My interpretation is that despite claims through many years, also long before 1992,1 that psychiatric disorders are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, the public is not so willing to accept this falsehood.

In 2005, Danish psychiatrists reported what 493 patients had told them about their depression pill treatment.6 About half the patients agreed that the treatment could alter their personality and that they had less control over their thoughts and feelings. Four-fifths agreed that as long as they took the drugs, they didn’t really know if they were necessary, and 56% agreed to the statement that, “Your body can become addicted to antidepressants.” The psychiatrists refused flatly to believe what the patients had told them, which they considered wrong, and they called them ignorant. They also felt that the patients needed “psychoeducation.” The problem with this was that the relatives shared the patients’ opinion.

“Educating the public” and “psychoeducation” so that they can arrive at the “right opinion” is what we normally call brainwashing. Particularly when what the patients and the public reported are more than just opinions; they drew conclusions based on their own experience and that of others.

It is not only in research that psychiatrists dismiss what their patients tell them, they also do this in clinical practice. Often, they either don’t listen or don’t ask the appropriate questions about their patients’ experience and history and therefore don’t find out that the current symptoms are very likely caused by trauma or severe stress, and not by any “psychiatric disorder.”

Please note that when I generalise, it does of course not apply to everyone. Some psychiatrists are excellent, but they are in a small minority. It is no wonder that the UK pre-campaign survey found that “the word psychiatrist carried connotations of stigma and even fear.”3 This is understandable, given that psychiatric drugs kill hundreds of thousands of people every year and cripple millions, physically and mentally.1

The term “psychiatric survivor” says it all in just two words. In no other medical specialty do the patients call themselves survivors in the sense that they survived despite being exposed to that specialty. They fought their way out of a system that is rarely helpful, and which many survivors have described as psychiatric imprisonment, or a facility where there is a door in, but not a door out.

In other medical specialties, the patients are grateful that they survived because of the treatments their doctors applied to them. We have never heard of a cardiology survivor or an infectious disease survivor. If you have survived a heart attack, you are not tempted to do the opposite of what your doctor recommends. In psychiatry, you might die if you do what your doctor tells you to do.

Many psychiatric survivors have described how psychiatry, with its excessive use of harmful and ineffective drugs, had stolen 10 or 15 years of their life before they one day decided to take the responsibility for their life back from their psychiatrists and discovered that life is much better without drugs. They often say that what woke them up was that they read some of the books about psychiatry by psychiatrists David Healy, Peter Breggin or Joanna Moncrieff, science journalist Robert Whitaker, or me.

There are thousands of personal stories by psychiatric survivors on the Internet, e.g. on survivingantidepressants.org. In many of them, people explain how they withdrew from psychiatric drugs, one by one, often against their doctor’s advice and often with great difficulty, because the drugs had made them dependent and because the psychiatric profession had failed totally in providing proper guidance about how to do it. The psychiatrists have not only been uninterested in tackling this immense problem but have actively denied its existence, as you have just seen and will see much more about in this book.

Mental health issues prevent you from living a full life and they go on in your mind. All patients should be offered psychotherapy, which is also what 75% of them want.7 However, this is not what they get, which shows once again that the psychiatric profession doesn’t listen to its patients. A large US survey of people with depression showed that 87% received depression pills, 23% psychotherapy, 14% anxiety pills, 7% psychosis pills and 5% “mood stabilizers” (a euphemism that the psychiatrists never defined, but they usually mean antiepileptic drugs and lithium, whose main effect is to sedate people).8

Most people have issues with their mental health now and then, just as they have issues with their physical health. There is nothing abnormal about that.

Throughout this book, I shall give advice based on the scientific evidence that I have good reasons to believe will lead to better outcomes than if my advice is ignored. But please note that whatever you do and whatever the outcome, you cannot hold me responsible. The information I provide is not a replacement for consultations with healthcare professionals but might empower you to engage in meaningful and informed discussions or to decide to handle the issues yourself. I shall start with a little advice and will give the background for it in the rest of the book: