Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans – interview with Robert Whitaker

Robert Whitaker is a highly respected journalist and author of ‘Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill’. Found the following on PBS American Experience

“Journalist Robert Whitaker’s articles on the mentally ill and the drug industry have won several awards, including the George Polk Award for medical writing and the National Association of Science Writers’ Award for best magazine article. He was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a Boston Globe series on harmful research involving the mentally ill that he co-wrote in 1998 — a series which led him to write Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Perseus Publishing, 2002).” 

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Mad in America

“Mad in America has been dismissed as a polemic and its author has been vilified as an incompetent reporter by biopsychiatrists and representatives of the pharmaceutical industry. On the other hand, psychiatric survivors have hailed the book as a validation of their claims about the abuses of biopsychiatry, claims that are typically dismissed as coming from deluded mental patients. Reviewers with an academic or scientific background, with no ties to either side of the controversy, appear to find the book to be a somewhat shocking, well-documented piece of investigative reporting.” 

I love Wikipedia’s definition of polemic:

Polemics is the practice of disputing or controverting religious, philosophical, or political matters. As such, a polemic text on a topic is written specifically to dispute or refute a topic that is widely viewed to be a “sacred cow” or beyond reproach, in an effort to promote factual awareness.

Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans is an interview with Robert Whitaker by Terry Messman, August 27, 2005. Found this on NewsTarget.com and what follows is an excerpt. Please click for the full interview.  If you haven’t seen this before, you may be in for a shock. You know what they say is the root of all evil. Robert Whitaker certainly makes it seem that way with regard to psychiatric labeling and drugs. I have so much respect for people like Robert Whitaker. It’s just so difficult for me personally to speak up and speak out against injustice. I get tongue-tied and choked up with emotion, especially when the injustice is coming from someone or some group I imagine to have more power. How does he and others do it, considering what they’re up against? It takes such courage and strength. 

I remember this young woman in Concordia U., this was quite a few years back… ok, over a decade… and I heard her saying she was going into biochemistry, in particular, psychopharmacology, because that’s where the jobs and money were. 

News Target – August 27 2005

SS: There’s supposedly an alarming increase in mental illness being diagnosed in children. Millions are diagnosed with depression, bipolar and psychotic symptoms, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Is this explosive new prevalence of mental illness among children a real increase, or is it a marketing campaign that enriches the psychiatric drug industry, a bonanza for the pharmaceutical corporations?

RW: You’re touching on something now that is a tragic scandal of monumental proportions. I talk sometimes to college classes, psychology classes. You cannot believe the percentage of youth who have been told they were mentally ill as kids, that something was wrong with them. It’s absolutely phenomenal. It’s absolutely cruel to be telling kids that they have these broken brains and mental illnesses.

There’s two things that are happening here. One, of course, is that it’s complete nonsense. As you remember as a kid, you have too much energy or you behave sometimes in not altogether appropriate ways, and you do have these extremes of emotions, especially during your teenage years. Both children and teenagers can be very emotional. So one thing that’s going on is that they take childhood behaviors and start defining behaviors they don’t like as pathological. They start defining emotions that are uncomfortable as pathological. So part of what we’re doing is pathologizing childhood with straight-out definition stuff. We’re pathologizing poverty among kids.

For example, if you’re a foster kid, and maybe you drew a bad straw in the lottery of life and are born into a dysfunctional family and you get put into foster care, do you know what happens today? You pretty likely are going to get diagnosed with a mental disorder, and you’re going to be placed on a psychiatric drug. In Massachusetts, it’s something like 60 to 70 percent of kids in foster care are now on psychiatric drugs. These kids aren’t mentally ill! They got a raw deal in life. They ended up in a foster home, which means they were in a bad family situation, and what does our society do? They say: “You have a defective brain.” It’s not that society was bad and you didn’t get a fair deal. No, the kid has a defective brain and has to be put on this drug. It’s absolutely criminal.

Let’s talk about bipolar disorder among kids. As one doctor said, that used to be so rare as to be almost nonexistent. Now we’re seeing it all over. Bipolar is exploding among kids. Well, partly you could say that we’re just slapping that label on kids more often; but in fact, there is something real going on. Here’s what’s happening. You take kids and put them on an antidepressant — which we never used to do — or you put them on a stimulant like Ritalin. Stimulants can cause mania; stimulants can cause psychosis.

SS: And antidepressants can also cause mania, as you pointed out.

RW: Exactly, so the kid ends up with a drug-induced manic or psychotic episode. Once they have that, the doctor at the emergency room doesn’t say, “Oh, he’s suffering from a drug-induced episode.” He says he’s bipolar.

SS: Then they give him a whole new drug for the mental disorder caused by the first drug.

RW: Yeah, they give him an antipsychotic drug; and now he’s on a cocktail of drugs, and he’s on a path to becoming disabled for life. That’s an example of how we’re absolutely making kids sick.

SS: It’s like society or their schools are trying to make them manageable and they end up putting them on a chemical roller coaster against their will.

RW: Absolutely.

SS: There’s an astonishing number of kids being given Ritalin to cure hyperactivity. But what 10-year-old boy in a confined school setting isn’t hyperactive? You write that the effect of Ritalin on the dopamine system is very similar to cocaine and amphetamines.

RW: Ritalin is methylphenidate. Now methylphenidate affects the brain in exactly the same way as cocaine. They both block a molecule that is involved in the reuptake of dopamine.

SS: So they both increase the dopamine levels in the brain?

RW: Exactly. And they do it with a similar degree of potency. So methylphenidate is very similar to cocaine. Now, one difference is whether you’re snorting it or if it’s in a pill. That partly changes how quickly it’s metabolized. But still, it basically affects the brain in the same way. Now, methylphenidate was used in research studies to deliberately stir psychosis in schizophrenics. Because they knew that you could take a person with a tendency towards psychosis, give them methylphenidate, and cause psychosis. We also knew that amphetamines, like methylphenidate, could cause psychosis in people who had never been psychotic before.

So think about this. We’re giving a drug to kids that is known to have the possibility of stirring psychosis. Now, the odd thing about methylphenidate and amphetamines is that, in kids, they sort of have a counterintuitive effect. What does speed do in adults? It makes them more jittery and hyperactive. For whatever reasons, in kids amphetamines will actually still their movements; it will actually keep them in their chairs and make them more focused. So you’ve got kids in boring schools. The boys are not paying attention and they’re diagnosed with ADHD and put on a drug that is known to stir psychosis. The next thing you know, a fair number of them are not doing well by the time they’re 15, 16, 17. Some of those kids talk about how when you’re on these drugs for the long term, you start feeling like a zombie; you don’t feel like yourself.

SS: Hollowed-out, blunted emotions. And this is being done to millions of kids.

RW: Millions of kids! Think about what we’re doing. We’re robbing kids of their right to be kids, their right to grow, their right to experience their full range of emotions, and their right to experience the world in its full hue of colors. That’s what growing up is, that’s what being alive is! And we’re robbing kids of their right to be. It’s so criminal. And we’re talking about millions of kids who have been affected this way. There are some colleges where something like 40 to 50 percent of the kids arrive with a psychiatric prescription.

SS: It looks like a huge social-control mechanism. Society gives kids Ritalin and antidepressants to subdue them and make them conform. On the one hand, it’s all about social control and conformity. But it also has a huge marketing payoff.

RW: You’re right, it creates customers for the drugs, and hopefully lifelong customers. That’s what they’re told, aren’t they? They’re told they are going to be on these drugs for life. And next thing they know, they’re on two or three or four drugs. It’s brilliant from the capitalist point of view. It does serve some social-control function. But you take a kid, and you turn them into a customer, and hopefully a lifelong customer. It’s brilliant.

We now spend more on antidepressants in this country than the Gross National Product of mid-sized countries like Jordan. It’s just amazing amounts of money. The amount of money we spend on psychiatric drugs in this country is more than the Gross National Product of two-thirds of the world’s countries. It’s just this incredibly lucrative paradigm of the mind that you can fix chemical imbalances in the brain with these drugs. It works so well from a capitalistic point of view for Eli Lilly. When Prozac came to market, Eli Lilly’s value on Wall Street, its capitalization, was around 2 billion dollars. By the year 2000, the time when Prozac was its number-one drug, its capitalization reached 80 billion dollars — a forty-fold increase.

So that’s what you really have to look at if you want to see why drug companies have pursued this vision with such determination. It brings billions of dollars in wealth in terms of increased stock prices to the owners and managers of those companies. It also benefits the psychiatric establishment that gets behind the drugs; they do well by this. There’s a lot of money flowing in the direction of those that will embrace this form of care. There’s advertisements that enrich the media. It’s all a big gravy train.

Unfortunately, the cost is dishonesty in our scientific literature, the corruption of the FDA, and the absolute harm done to children in this country drawn into this system, and an increase of 150,000 newly disabled people every year in the United States for the last 17 years. That’s an incredible record of harm done.

SS: Everyone gets rich — the drug companies, the psychiatrists, the researchers, the advertising agencies — and the clients get drugged out of their minds and damaged for life.

RW: And you know what’s interesting? No one says that the mental health of the American people is getting better. Instead, everyone says we have this increasing problem They blame it on the stresses of modern life or something like that, and they don’t want to look at the fact that we’re creating mental illness.