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

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[sSRI-Research] Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans

- Robert Whitaker/August 27, 2005

 

 

 

Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans - interview with Robert

Whitaker

 

Posted Saturday, August 27, 2005 by Terry Messman

http://www.newstarget.com/011353.html

 

The following is a Street Spirit interview with Robert Whitaker,

author of Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring

Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. It is reprinted here with permission

from the Street Spirit in Oakland, California. The interview is

conducted by Terry Messman, editor of Street Spirit.

 

Investigative reporter Robert Whitaker, author of the groundbreaking

book Mad In America, is now pursuing a fascinating line of research

into how the mammoth psychiatric drug industry is endangering the

American public by covering up the untold cases of suffering, anguish

and disease caused by the most widely prescribed antidepressants and

antipsychotic medications.

 

Whitaker exposes the massive lies and cover-ups that have corrupted

the Food and Drug Administration's drug review process, and co-opted

research trials in order to spin the results of drug tests and conceal

the serious hazards and even deadly side-effects of brand-name drugs

like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Zyprexa.

 

The story becomes even more frightening when we look at the aggressive

tactics these giant drug companies have used to silence prominent

critics by defaming them in the press, and by using their money and

power to have widely respected scientists and eminent medical

researchers fired for daring to point out the hazards and risks of

suicide and premature death caused by these drugs.

 

Whitaker starts by debunking the effectiveness of these massively

hyped wonder drugs -- antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil,

and the new atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa. His research

shows how they often are barely more effective than placebos in

treating mental disorder and depression, despite the glowing adulation

they have received in the mainstream media.

 

But he goes on to make the startling claim that these new psychiatric

drugs have directly contributed to an alarming new epidemic of

drug-induced mental illness. The very drugs prescribed by physicians

to stabilize mental disorders in fact are inducing pathological

changes in brain chemistry and triggering suicide, manic and psychotic

episodes, convulsions, violence, diabetes, pancreatic failure,

metabolic diseases, and premature death.

 

Whitaker originally was a highly regarded medical reporter at the

Albany Times Union and also wrote off and on for the Boston Globe. A

series he co-wrote for the Boston Globe on harmful psychiatric

research was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. When he began

his investigative research into psychiatric issues, Whitaker was still

a believer in the story of progress that psychiatry has been telling

the public for decades.

 

He said, " I absolutely believed the common wisdom that these

antipsychotic drugs actually had improved things and that they had

totally revolutionized how we treated schizophrenia. People used to be

locked away forever, and now maybe things weren't great, but they were

a lot better. It was a story of progress. "

 

That story of progress was fraudulent, as Whitaker soon found out when

he gained new insight from his research into torturous psychiatric

practices such as electroshock, lobotomy, insulin coma, and

neuroleptic drugs. Psychiatrists told the public that these techniques

" cured " psychosis or balanced the chemistry of the brain.

 

But, in reality, the common thread in all these different treatments

was the attempt to suppress " mental illness " by deliberately damaging

the higher functions of the brain. The stunning truth is that, behind

closed doors, the psychiatric establishment itself labeled these

treatments as " brain-damaging therapeutics. "

 

The first generation of antipsychotic drugs created a drug-induced

brain pathology by blocking the neurotransmitter dopamine and

essentially shutting down many higher brain functions. In fact, when

antipsychotics such as Thorazine and Haldol were first introduced,

psychiatrists themselves said that these neuroleptic drugs were

virtually indistinguishable from a " chemical lobotomy. "

 

In recent years, the media have heralded the arrival of so-called

designer drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zyprexa that are supposed to be

superior and have fewer side effects than the old tricyclic

antidepressants and the first antipsychotics. Millions of Americans

have believed this story and have enriched drug companies like Eli

Lilly by spending billions of dollars annually to purchase these new

medications.

 

Whitaker's research into the tragic cases of disease, suffering and

early deaths caused by these drugs shows that millions of consumers

have been misled by a massive campaign of lies, distortions, and

bought-and-paid-for drug trials. Eminent medical researchers who have

tried to warn us of the perils of these drugs have been silenced,

intimidated and defamed. In the process, the Food and Drug

Administration has become the lapdog of the giant pharmaceutical

industry, not its watchdog.

 

Street Spirit interviewed Robert Whitaker about this new " epidemic " of

mental disorders, and how the giant drug companies have profited from

selling drugs that make us sicker.

 

Street Spirit: Your new line of research indicates that there has been

an enormous rise in the incidence of mental illness in the United

States, despite the seeming advances in a new generation of

psychiatric drugs. Why do you refer to this increase as an epidemic?

 

Robert Whitaker: Even people like the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey

wrote a book recently in which he said it looks like we're having an

epidemic of mental illness. When the National Institute of Mental

Health publishes its figures on the incidence of mental illness, you

see these rising numbers of mentally ill people. Some recent reports

even say that 20 percent of Americans now are mentally ill.

 

So what I wanted to do was two-fold. I wanted to look into exactly how

dramatic is this increase in mental illness, and particularly severe

mental illness. Part of this rise in the number of people said to be

mentally ill is just definitional. We draw a big wide boundary today

and we throw all sorts of people into that category of mentally ill.

So children who are not sitting neatly enough in their school rooms

are said to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and

we created a new disorder called social anxiety disorder.

 

SS: So what used to be called simply shyness or anxiety in relating to

people is now labeled a mental disorder and you supposedly need an

antidepressant like Paxil for social anxiety disorder.

 

RW: Exactly. And you need a stimulant like Ritalin for ADHD.

 

SS: This increases psychiatry's clients, but doesn't it also increase

the number of people that giant pharmaceutical companies can sell

their psychiatric drugs to?

 

RW: Absolutely. So part of what we're seeing is nothing more than the

creation of a larger market for drugs. If you think about it, as long

as we draw as big a circle as possible, and expand the boundaries of

mental illness, psychiatry can have more clients and sell more drugs.

So there's a built-in economic incentive to define mental illness in

as broad terms as possible, and to find ordinary, distressing emotions

or behaviors that some people may not like and label them as mental

illness.

 

SS: Your research also shows that there is a real increase in people

who have a severe mental disorder. Now, this seems counterintuitive,

but is it true that you believe much of this increase is caused by the

overuse of some of the new generations of psychiatric drugs?

 

RW: Yes, exactly. I looked at the number of the so-called severely

disabled mentally ill -- people who aren't working or who are somehow

dysfunctional because of mental illness. So I wanted to chart through

history the percentage of the population who are considered the

disabled mentally ill.

 

Now, by 1903, we see that roughly 1 out of every 500 people in the

United States is hospitalized for mental illness. By 1955, at the

start of the modern era of psychiatric drugs, roughly one out of every

300 people was disabled by mental illness. Now, let's go to 1987, the

end of the first generation of antipsychotic drugs; and from 1987

forward we get the modern psychiatric drugs. From 1955 to 1987, during

this first era of psychiatric drugs -- the antipsychotic drugs

Thorazine and Haldol and the tricyclic antidepressants (such as Elavil

and Anafranil) -- we saw the number of disabled mentally ill increase

four-fold, to the point where roughly one out of every 75 persons are

deemed disabled mentally ill.

 

Now, there was a shift in how we cared for the disabled mentally ill

between 1955 and 1987. In 1955, we were hospitalizing them. Then, by

1987, we had gone through social change, and we were now placing

people in shelters, nursing homes, and some sort of community care,

and gave them either SSI or SSDI payments for mental disability. In

1987, we started getting these supposedly better, second-generation

psychiatric drugs like Prozac and the other selective serotonin

re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. Shortly after that, we get

the new, atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa (olanzapine),

Clozaril and Risperdal.

 

What's happened since 1987? Well, the disability rate has continued to

increase until it's now one in every 50 Americans. Think about that:

One in every 50 Americans disabled by mental illness today. And it's

still increasing. The number of mentally disabled people in the United

States has been increasing at the rate of 150,000 people per year

since 1987. That's an increase every day over the last 17 years of 410

people per day newly disabled by mental illness.

 

SS: So that leads to the obvious question. If psychiatry has

introduced these so-called wonder drugs like Prozac and Zoloft and

Zyprexa, why is the incidence of mental illness going up dramatically?

 

RW: That's exactly it. This is a scientific question. We have a form

of care where we're using these drugs in an ever more expansive

manner, and supposedly we have better drugs and they're the

cornerstone of our care, so we should see decreasing disability rates.

That's what your expectation would be.

 

Instead, from 1987 until the present, we saw an increase in the number

of mentally disabled people from 3.3 million people to 5.7 million

people in the United States. In that time, our spending on psychiatric

drugs increased to an amazing degree. Combined spending on

antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants jumped from around $500

million in 1986 to nearly $20 billion in 2004. So we raise the

question: Is the use of these drugs somehow actually fueling this

increase in the number of the disabled mentally ill?

 

When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of

outcomes with all these drugs -- you see it with the antipsychotics,

the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like

Ritalin used to treat ADHD. All these drugs may curb a target symptom

slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of

time, say six weeks. An antidepressant may ameliorate the symptoms of

depression better than a placebo over the short term.

 

What you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a

worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety

over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients. So even on

the target symptoms, there's greater chronicity and greater severity

of symptoms. And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients

where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the

drug itself.

 

SS: New psychiatric symptoms created by the very drugs people are told

will help them recover?

 

RW: Absolutely. The most obvious case is with the antidepressants. A

certain percentage of people placed on the SSRIs because they have

some form of depression will suffer either a manic or psychotic attack

-- drug-induced. This is well recognized. So now, instead of just

dealing with depression, they're dealing with mania or psychotic

symptoms. And once they have a drug-induced manic episode, what

happens? They go to an emergency room, and at that point they're newly

diagnosed. They're now said to be bipolar and they're given an

antipsychotic to go along with the antidepressant; and, at that point,

they're moving down the path to chronic disability.

 

SS: Modern psychiatry claims that these psychiatric drugs correct

pathological brain chemistry. Is there any evidence to back up their

claim that abnormal brain chemistry is the culprit in schizophrenia

and depression?

 

RW: This is the key thing everyone needs to understand. It really is

the answer that unlocks this mystery of why the drugs would have this

long-term problematic effect. Start with schizophrenia. They

hypothesize that these drugs work by correcting an imbalance of the

neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.

 

The theory was that people with schizophrenia had overactive dopamine

systems; and these drugs, by blocking dopamine in the brain, fixed

that chemical imbalance. Therefore, you get the metaphor that they're

like insulin is for diabetes; they're fixing an abnormality. With the

antidepressants, the theory was that people with depression had too

low levels of serotonin; the drugs upped the levels of serotonin in

the brain and therefore they're balancing the brain chemistry.

 

First of all, those theories never arose from investigations into what

was actually happening to people. Rather, they would find out that

antipsychotics blocked dopamine and so they theorized that people had

overactive dopamine systems. Same with the antidepressants. They found

that antidepressants upped the levels of serotonin; therefore, they

theorized that people with depression must have low levels of serotonin.

 

But here is the thing that one wishes all of America would know and

wishes psychiatry would come clean on: They've never been able to find

that people with schizophrenia have overactive dopamine systems.

They've never been able to find that people with depression have

underactive serotonin systems. They've never found consistently that

any of these disorders are associated with any chemical imbalance in

the brain. The story that people with mental disorders have known

chemical imbalances -- that's a lie. We don't know that at all. It's

just something that they say to help sell the drugs and help sell the

biological model of mental disorders.

 

But the kicker is this. We do know, in fact, that these drugs perturb

how these chemical messengers work in the brain. The real paradigm is:

People diagnosed with mental disorders have no known problem with

their neurotransmitter systems; and these drugs perturb the normal

function of neurotransmitters.

 

SS: So rather than fixing a chemical imbalance, these widely

prescribed drugs distort the brain chemistry and make it pathological.

RW: Absolutely. Stephen Hyman, a well-known neuroscientist and the

former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote a

paper in 1996 that looked at how psychiatric drugs affect the brain.

He wrote that all these drugs create perturbations in neurotransmitter

functions. And he notes that the brain, in response to this drug from

the outside, alters its normal functions and goes through a series of

compensatory adaptations.

 

In other words, it tries to adapt to the fact that an antipsychotic

drug is blocking normal dopamine functions. Or in the case of

antidepressants, it tries to compensate for the fact that you're

blocking a normal reuptake of serotonin. The way it does this is to

adapt in the opposite way. So, if you're blocking dopamine in the

brain, the brain tries to put out more dopamine and it actually

increases the number of dopamine receptors. So a person placed on

antipsychotic drugs will end up with an abnormally high number of

dopamine receptors in the brain.

 

If you give someone an antidepressant, and that tries to keep

serotonin levels too high in the brain, it does exactly the opposite.

It stops producing as much serotonin as it normally does and it

reduces the number of serotonin receptors in the brain. So someone who

is on an antidepressant, after a time ends up with an abnormally low

level of serotonin receptors in the brain. And here's what Hyman

concluded about this: After these changes happened, the patient's

brain is functioning in a way that is " qualitatively as well as

quantitatively different from the normal state. " So what Stephen

Hyman, former head of the NIMH, has done is present a paradigm for how

these drugs affect the brain that shows that they're inducing a

pathological state.

 

SS: So the paradox is there's no evidence for modern psychiatry's

claim that there is any pathological biochemical imbalance in the

brain that causes mental illness, but if you treat people with these

new wonder drugs, that is what creates a pathological imbalance?

 

RW: Yes, these drugs disrupt normal brain chemistry. That's the real

paradox here. And the real tragedy is, that even as we peddle these

drugs as chemical balancers, chemical fixers, in truth we're doing

precisely the opposite. We're taking a brain that has no known

abnormal brain chemistry, and by placing people on the drugs, we're

perturbing that normal chemistry. Here's how Barry Jacobs, a Princeton

neuroscientist, describes what happens to a person given an SSRI

antidepressant. " These drugs, " he said, " alter the level of synaptic

transmission beyond the physiologic range achieved under normal

environmental biological conditions. Thus, any behavioral or

physiologic change produced under these conditions might more

appropriately be considered pathologic rather than reflective of the

normal biological role of serotonin. "

 

SS: One of the SSRI antidepressants that's widely believed to be a

wonder drug is Prozac. Yet your research found that the Food and Drug

Administration (FDA) received more adverse reports about Prozac than

any other drug. What sort of ill effects were people reporting?

 

RW: First of all, with Prozac and the SSRIs that followed, their level

of efficacy was always of a very minor sort. In all the clinical

trials of the antidepressants, roughly 41 percent of the patients got

better in the short term versus 31 percent of the patients on placebo.

Now just one other caveat on that. If you use an active placebo in

these trials -- an active placebo causes a physiologic change with no

benefit, like a dry mouth -- any difference in outcome between the

antidepressant and placebo virtually disappears.

 

 

SS: Weren't the early drug tests of Prozac so unpromising that they

had to manipulate test results to get FDA approval at all?

 

RW: What happened with Prozac is a fascinating story. Right from the

beginning, they noticed only very marginal efficacy over placebo; and

they noticed that they had some problems with suicide. There were

increased suicidal responses compared to placebo. In other words, the

drugs was agitating people and making people suicidal who hadn't been

suicidal before. They were getting manic responses in people who

hadn't been manic before. They were getting psychotic episodes in

people who hadn't been psychotic before. So you were seeing these very

problematic side effects even at the same time that you were seeing

very modest efficacy, if any, over placebo in ameliorating depression.

 

Basically, what Eli Lilly (Prozac's manufacturer) had to do was cover

up the psychosis, cover up the mania; and, in that manner, it was able

to get these drugs approved. One FDA reviewer even warned that Prozac

appeared to be a dangerous drug, but it was approved anyway. We're

seemingly finding all this out only now: " Oh, Prozac can cause

suicidal impulses and all these SSRIs may increase the risk of

suicide. " The point is, that wasn't anything new. That data was there

from the very first trial. You had people in Germany saying, " I think

this is a dangerous drug. "

 

SS: Even back in the late 1980s, they already knew?

 

RW: Before the late 1980s -- in the early '80s, before Prozac gets

approved. Basically what Eli Lilly had to do was cover up that risk of

mania and psychosis, cover up that some people were becoming suicidal

because they were getting this nervous agitation from Prozac. That's

the only way it got approved.

 

There were various ways they did the cover-up. One was just to simply

remove reports of psychosis from some of the data. They also went back

and recoded some of the trial results. Let's say someone had a manic

episode or a psychotic episode; instead of putting that down, they

would just put down a return of depression, and that sort of thing. So

there was a basic need to hide these risks right from the beginning,

and that's what was done.

 

So Prozac gets approved in 1987, and it's launched in this amazing PR

campaign. The pill itself is featured on the cover of several

magazines! It's like the Pill of the Year [laughs]. And it's said to

be so much safer: a wonder drug. We have doctors saying, " Oh, the real

problem with this drug is that we can now create whatever personality

we want. We're just so skilled with these drugs that if you want to be

happy all the time, take your pill! "

 

That was complete nonsense. The drugs were barely better than placebo

at alleviating depressive symptoms over the short term. You had all

these problems; yet we were touting these drugs, saying, " Oh, the

powers of psychiatry are such that we can give you the mind you want

-- a designer personality! " It was absolutely obscene. Meanwhile,

which drug, after being launched, quickly became the most complained

about drug in America? Prozac!

 

SS: What were the level of complaints when Prozac hit the market?

 

RW: In this county, we have Medwatch, a reporting system in which we

report adverse events about psychiatric drugs to the FDA. By the way,

the FDA tries to keep these adverse reports from the public. So,

instead of the FDA making these easily available to the public. so you

can know about the dangers of the drugs, it's very hard to get these

reports.

 

Within one decade, there were 39,000 adverse reports about Prozac that

were sent to Medwatch. The number of adverse events sent to Medwatch

is thought to represent only one percent of the actual number of such

events. So, if we get 39,000 adverse event reports about Prozac, the

number of people who have actually suffered such problems is estimated

to be 100 times as many, or roughly four million people. This makes

Prozac the most complained about drug in America, by far. There were

more adverse event reports received about Prozac in its first two

years on the market than had been reported on the leading tricyclic

antidepressant in 20 years.

 

Remember, Prozac is pitched to the American public as this wonderfully

safe drug, and yet what are people complaining about? Mania, psychotic

depression, nervousness, anxiety, agitation, hostility,

hallucinations, memory loss, tremors, impotence, convulsions,

insomnia, nausea, suicidal impulses. It's a wide range of serious

symptoms.

 

And here's the kicker. It wasn't just Prozac. Once we got the other

SSRIs on the market, like Zoloft and Paxil, by 1994, four SSRI

antidepressants were among the top 20 most complained about drugs on

the FDA's Medwatch list. In other words, every one of these drugs

brought to market started triggering this range of adverse events. And

these were not minor things. When you talk about mania,

hallucinations, psychotic depression, these are serious adverse events.

 

Prozac was pitched to the American public as a wonder drug. It was

featured on the covers of magazines as so safe, and as a sign of our

wonderful ability to effect the brain just as we want it. In truth,

the reports were showing it could trigger a lot of dangerous events,

including suicide and psychosis.

 

 

The FDA was being warned about this. They were getting a flood of

adverse event reports, and the public was never told about this for

the longest period of time. It took a decade for the FDA to begin to

acknowledge the increased suicides and the violence it can trigger in

some people. It just shows how the FDA betrayed the American people.

This is a classic example. They betrayed their responsibility to act

as a watchdog for the American people. Instead they acted as an agency

that covered up harm and risk with these drugs.

 

SS: In light of the FDA's failure to warn us about Prozac, what about

their recent negligence on the issue of the risk of suicide in

children given antidepressants like Paxil? Weren't England's mental

health officials far better than their American counterparts in the

FDA in warning about the dangers of suicidal attempts when

antidepressants are given to youth?

 

RW: Yes. The children's story is unbelievably tragic. It's also a

really sordid story. Let's go back a little to see what happened to

children and antidepressants. Prozac comes to market in 1987. By the

early 1990s, the pharmaceutical companies making these drugs are

saying, " How do we expand the market for antidepressants? " Because

that's what drug companies do -- they want to get to an ever-larger

number of people. They saw they had an untapped market in kids. So

let's start peddling the drugs to kids. And they were successful.

Since 1990, the use of antidepressants in kids went up something like

seven-fold. They began prescribing them willy-nilly.

 

Now, whenever they did pediatric trials of antidepressants, they found

that the drugs were no more effective on the target symptom of

depression than placebo. This happened again and again in the

pediatric drug trials of antidepressants. So, what that tells you is

there is no real therapeutic rationale for the drugs because in this

population of kids, the drugs don't even curb the target symptoms over

the short term any better than placebo; and yet they were causing all

sorts of adverse events.

 

For example, in one trial, 75 percent of youth treated with

antidepressants suffered an adverse event of some kind. In one study

by the University of Pittsburgh, 23 percent of children treated with

an SSRI developed mania or manic-like symptoms; an additional 19

percent developed drug-induced hostility. The clinical results were

telling you that you didn't get any benefit on depression; and you

could cause all sorts of real problems in kids -- mania, hostility,

psychosis, and you may even stir suicide. In other words, don't use

these drugs, right? It was absolutely covered up.

 

SS: How was it covered up?

 

RW: We had psychiatrists -- some of those obviously getting money from

the drug companies -- saying the kids are under-treated and they're at

risk of suicide and how could we possibly treat kids without these

pills and what a tragedy it would be if we couldn't use these

antidepressants.

Finally, a prominent researcher in England, David Healy, started doing

his own research on the ability of these drugs to stir suicide. He

also managed to get access to some of the trial results and he blew

the whistle. He first blew the whistle in England and he presented

this data to the review authorities there. And they saw that it looks

like these drugs are increasing the risk of suicide and there are

really no signs of benefits on the target symptoms of depression. So

they began to move there to warn doctors not to prescribe these drugs

to youth.

 

What happens in the United States? Well, it's only after there's a lot

of pressure put on the FDA that they even hold a hearing. The FDA sort

of downplays the risk of these drugs. They're slow to even put black

box warnings on them. Why? Aren't kids lives worth protecting? If we

know that we have a scientifically shown risk that these drugs

increase suicide, shouldn't you at least warn about it? But the FDA

was even digging in its heels about putting that black box warning on

the drugs.

 

SS: If Prozac is the nation's most complained about drug, if Paxil is

shown to be a suicide risk for youth, how do these antidepressants

continue to have a reputation as near-magic cures for depression? And

why did the FDA failed to warn us about Paxil and Prozac for such a

long time?

 

RW: There's a couple reasons for that. The FDA's funding changed in

the 1990s. An act was passed in which a lot of the FDA's funding came

from the drug industry: the PDUFA Act, or Prescription Drug User Fee

Act. Basically, when drug companies applied for FDA approval they had

to pay a fee. Those fees became what is funding a large portion of the

FDA's review of drug applications.

 

So all of a sudden, the funding is coming from the drug industry; it's

no longer coming from the people. As that act comes up for renewal,

basically the drug lobbyists are telling the FDA that their job is no

longer to be critically analyzing drugs, but to approve drugs quickly.

And that was part of Newt Gingrich's thing: Your job is to get these

drugs to market. Start partnering with the drug industry and

facilitating drug development. We lost this idea that the FDA had a

watchdog role.

 

Also, in a human way, a lot of people who work for the FDA leave there

and end up going to work for the drug companies. The old joke is that

the FDA is sort of like a showcase for a future job in the drug

industry. You go there, you work awhile, then you go off into the drug

industry. Well, if that's the progression that people make, in essence

they're making good old boy network connections, so they're not going

to be so harsh on the drug companies. So, that's what really happened

in the 1990s. The FDA was given new marching orders. The orders were:

" Facilitate getting drugs to market. Don't be too critical. And, in

fact, if you want to keep your funding, which was coming now from the

drug industry, make sure you take these lessons to heart. "

 

SS: So the giant pharmaceutical companies have a vast amount of power

to cook the results of drug tests and make researchers and even the

FDA itself bow to their will?

 

RW: The FDA, in essence, was kneecapped in the early 1990s, and we

really saw it with the psychiatric drugs. The FDA became a lapdog for

the pharmaceutical industry, not a watchdog. It's only now that this

has become common knowledge. We have Marcia Angell, the former editor

of the New England Journal of Medicine, write a book in which she says

that the FDA became a lapdog. It's basically now well recognized that

you had this decline and fall. As the editor of the New England

Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical journal we have,

Marcia Angell is someone who was at the very heart of American

medicine, and she concluded that the FDA let down the American people.

And she lost her job at the New England Journal of Medicine for

starting to criticize pharmaceutical companies.

 

She was the editor of the journal in the late 1990s and there was a

corresponding doctor named Thomas Bodenheimer who decided to write an

article about how you couldn't even trust what was published in the

medical journals anymore because of all the spinning of results. So

they did an investigation about how the pharmaceutical companies are

funding all the research and spinning the trial results, so you can no

longer really trust what you read in scientific journals. They pointed

out that when they tried to get an expert to review the scientific

literature related to antidepressants, they basically couldn't find

someone who hadn't taken money from the drug companies.

 

Now, the New England Journal of Medicine is published by the

Massachusetts Medical Society which publishes a lot of other journals,

and they get a lot of pharmaceutical advertising. So what happens

after that article appears by Thomas Bodenheimer and an accompanying

editorial by Marcia Angell about the sorry state of American medicine

because of this? They both lose their jobs! She's gone and so is

Thomas Bodenheimer. Think about this. We have the leading medical

journal firing people, letting them go, because they dared to

criticize the dishonest science and the dishonest process that was

poisoning the scientific literature.

 

So we have the FDA that's acting as lapdogs. You can't trust the

scientific literature. All this shows how the American public was

betrayed and didn't know about all the problems with these drugs and

why it was kept from them. It has to do with money, prestige and old

boy networks.

 

SS: It also has to do with the silencing of critics. Eli Lilly uses

the media to trumpet Prozac's benefits and gives perks to doctors to

attend conferences to hear about its benefits, and buys off

researchers. But don't they also use their power and money to silence

their critics?

 

RW: An example is Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a psychiatrist who also works

for Harvard University Health Services, and who wrote a book called

Prozac Backlash to warn about the dangers of Prozac. He's finding that

the drugs are being overused and cause severe side effects. He even

raises questions about long-term memory problems with the drugs and

cognitive dysfunction. Well, Eli Lilly then mounted a public relations

campaign to try to discredit him. They sent out notices to the media

questioning his affiliation with Harvard Medical School, etc. It was

all about silencing the critics.

 

If you sing the tune that the drug companies want, at the very top

levels, you get paid a lot of money to fly around and give

presentations about the wonders of the drugs. And those who come, and

don't ask any embarrassing questions, get the lobster dinners and

maybe they get a little honorarium for attending this educational

meeting. So if you want to be part of this gravy train, you can. You

sing the wonders of the drug, and you don't talk about their nasty

side effects, and you can get a nice payment as one of their guest

speakers, as one of their experts.

 

But if you're one of the ones saying, " What about the mania, what

about the psychosis? " -- they do silence you. Look at what happened to

David Healy. Healy is even the best example. David Healy has this

sterling reputation in England. He's written several books on the

history of psychopharmacology. He's like the former Secretary of the

Psychopharmacology Association over there. He gets offered a job at

the University of Toronto to head up their psychiatry department. So

while he's waiting to assume that position at the University of

Toronto, he goes to Toronto and delivers a talk on the elevated risk

of suicide with Prozac and some of the other SSRIs. By the time he's

back home, the job offer has been rescinded.

 

Now does Eli Lilly donate some money to the University of Toronto?

Absolutely. So, to answer your question, yes, Eli Lilly silences

dissenters as well.

 

SS: What is the story behind the secret settlement between Eli Lilly

and the survivors who sued the company after Joseph Wesbecker shot 20

coworkers after being put on Prozac?

 

RW: During this trial in which Eli Lilly was being sued, the judge was

going to allow some very damaging evidence showing wrongdoing by Eli

Lilly in a previous instance. The judge said, " Go ahead and introduce

this at the trial. " But next thing you know, they don't introduce

this; and in fact, all of a sudden, the plaintiffs no longer are

presenting very damaging evidence to make their case. So the judge

wonders why they are not presenting their best case anymore. He smells

a rat. He suspects Eli Lilly has settled with the plaintiffs secretly

and the deal is that, as part of this settlement, the plaintiffs will

go ahead with a sham trial so that Eli Lilly will win the trial. Then

Eli Lilly can claim, " See our drug doesn't cause people to become

violent. "

 

And, indeed, that's what happened. Eli Lilly felt it was going to lose

this trial. They went to the plaintiffs and said they would give them

a lot of money. They agreed to go ahead and settle the case, but had

the plaintiffs go ahead with the trial. That way Eli Lilly can

publicly claim that they won the trial and Prozac doesn't cause harm.

 

SS: How did this even come out into the light of day?

 

RW: We would never have known about this except for two things. One,

believe it or not, the judge, in essence, appealed the decision in his

own court. He said, " I smell a rat. " And through that, he found out

that there was this secret settlement and that it was a sham

proceeding that continued on. He said it was one of the worst

violations of the integrity of the legal process that he'd ever seen.

And second, an English journalist named John Cornwell wrote a book

called Power to Harm: Mind, Medicine, and Murder on Trial. He wrote

about this case, and yet in the United States, we got almost no news

about this secret settlement and this whole perversion of the legal

process. It was an English journalist who was exposing this story.

 

My point here is this: They silence people like Marcia Angell. They

pervert the scientific process. They pervert the legal process. They

pervert the FDA drug review process. It's everywhere! And that's how

we as a society end up believing in these psychiatric drugs. You asked

the question a while back, " Why do we still believe in Prozac? " One of

the reasons is that the story about Prozac is, in effect, maintained.

It's publicly maintained because we do all this silencing along all

these lines.

 

The other thing to remember is that some people on Prozac do feel

better. That's true. That shows up, just in the same way that some

people on placebos feel better. And those are the stories that get

repeated: " Oh, I took Prozac and I'm feeling better. " It's that select

group that does better that becomes the story that is told out there,

and the story that the public hears. So that's why we continued to

believe in the story of these wonder drugs that are very safe in spite

of all this messy stuff that gets covered up.

 

SS: Let's now move from the antidepressants like Prozac to consider

another new group of supposed wonder drugs -- the new antipsychotic

drugs. You write that long-term use of antipsychotic drugs -- both the

original neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine and Haldol and the newer

atypicals like Zyprexa and Risperdal -- cause pathological changes in

the brain that can lead to a worsening of the symptoms of mental

illness. What changes in brain chemistry result from the

antipsychotics, and how can that lead to the most frightening prospect

you describe -- chronic mental illness that is locked in by these drugs?

 

RW: This is a line of research that goes across 40 years. This problem

of chronic illness shows up time and time again in the research

literature. This biological mechanism is somewhat well understood now.

The antipsychotics profoundly block dopamine receptors. They block

70-90 percent of the dopamine receptors in the brain. In return, the

brain sprouts about 50 percent extra dopamine receptors. It tries to

become extra sensitive.

 

So in essence you've created an imbalance in the dopamine system in

the brain. It's almost like, on one hand, you've got the accelerator

down -- that's the extra dopamine receptors. And the drug is the brake

trying to block this. But if you release that brake, if you abruptly

go off the drugs, you now do have a dopamine system that's overactive.

You have too many dopamine receptors. And what happens? People that go

abruptly off of the drug, do tend to have severe relapses.

 

SS: So people that have been treated with these antipsychotic drugs

have a far greater tendency to relapse, and have new episodes of

mental illness, as opposed to people who have had other kinds of

non-drug therapies?

 

RW: Absolutely, and that was understood by 1979, that you were

actually increasing the underlying biological vulnerability to the

psychosis. And by the way, we sort of understood that if you muck with

the dopamine system, that you could cause some symptoms of psychosis

with amphetamines. So if you give someone amphetamines enough, they're

at increased risk of psychosis. This is well known. And what do

amphetamines do? They release dopamine. So there is a biological

reason why, if you're mucking up the dopamine system, you're

increasing the risk of psychosis. That's in essence what these

antipsychotic drugs do, they muck up the dopamine system.

 

Here's just one real powerful study on this: Researchers with the

University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s took people newly diagnosed with

schizophrenia, and they started taking MRI pictures of the brains of

these people. So we get a picture of their brains at the moment of

diagnosis, and then we prepare pictures over the next 18 months to see

how those brains change. Now during this 18 months, they are being

prescribed antipsychotic medications, and what did the researchers

report? They reported that, over this 18-month period, the drugs

caused an enlargement of the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that

uses dopamine. In other words, it creates a visible change in

morphology, a change in the size of an area of the brain, and that's

abnormal. That's number one. So we have an antipsychotic drug causing

an abnormality in the brain.

 

Now here's the kicker. They found that as that enlargement occurred,

it was associated with a worsening of the psychotic symptoms, a

worsening of negative symptoms. So here you actually have, with modern

technology, a very powerful study. By imaging the brain, we see how an

outside agent comes in, disrupts normal chemistry, causes an abnormal

enlargement of the basal ganglia, and that enlargement causes a

worsening of the very symptoms it's supposed to treat. Now that's

actually, in essence, a story of a disease process -- an outside agent

causes abnormality, causes symptoms...

 

SS: But in this case, the outside agent that triggers the disease

process is the supposed cure for the disease! The psychiatric drug is

the disease-causing agent.

 

RW: That's exactly right. It's a stunning, damning finding. It's the

sort of finding you would say, " Oh Christ, we should be doing

something different. " Do you know what those researchers got new

grants for, after they reported that?

 

SS: No, what? You'd guess they got funding to carry out these same

studies on other classes of psychiatric drugs.

 

RW: They got a grant to develop an implant, a brain implant, that

would deliver drugs like Haldol on a continual basis! A grant to

develop a drug delivery implant so you could implant this in the

brains of people with schizophrenia and then they wouldn't even have a

chance not to take the drugs!

 

SS: Unbelievable. Designing an implant to provide a constant dose of a

drug that they had just discovered causes pathology in the brain

chemistry.

 

RW: Right, they had just found that they're causing a worsening of

symptoms! So why would you go on to a design a permanent implant?

Because that's where the money was. And no one wanted to deal with

this horrible finding of an enlargement of the basal ganglia caused by

the drugs, and that is associated with the worsening of symptoms. No

one wanted to deal with the fact that when you look at people

medicated on antipsychotics, you start to see a shrinking of the

frontal lobes. No one wants to talk about that either. They stopped

that research.

 

SS: What other side effects are caused by prolonged use of these

antipsychotic drugs?

 

RW: Oh, you get tardive dyskinesia, a permanent brain dysfunction; and

akathisia, which is this incredible nervous agitation. You're just

never comfortable. You want to sit but you can't sit. It's like you're

crawling out of your own skin. And it's associated with violence,

suicide and all sorts of horrible things.

 

SS: Those kinds of side-effects were notorious with the first

generation of antipsychotic drugs, like Thorazine, Haldol and

Stelazine. But, just as with Prozac, so many people are still touting

the new generation of atypical antipsychotics -- Zyprexa, Clozaril and

Risperdal -- as wonder drugs that control mental illness with far

fewer side effects. Is that true? What have you found?

 

RW: No, it's just complete nonsense. In fact, I think the newer drugs

will eventually be seen as more dangerous than the old drugs, if

that's possible. As you know, the standard neuroleptics like Thorazine

and Haldol have had quite a litany of harm with the tardive dyskinesia

and all. So when we got the new atypical drugs, they were touted as so

much safer. But with these new atypicals, you get all sorts of

metabolic dysfunctions.

 

Let's talk about Zyprexa. It has a different profile. So it may not

cause as much tardive dyskinesia. It may not cause as many

Parkinsonian symptoms. But it causes a whole range of new symptoms.

So, for example, it's more likely to cause diabetes. It's more likely

to cause pancreatic disorders. It's more likely to cause obesity and

appetite-disregulation disorders.

 

In fact, researchers in Ireland reported in 2003 that since the

introduction of the atypical antipsychotics, the death rate among

people with schizophrenia has doubled. They have done death rates of

people treated with standard neuroleptics and then they compare that

with death rates of people treated with atypical antipsychotics, and

it doubles. It doubles! It didn't reduce harm. In fact, in their

seven-year study, 25 of the 72 patients died.

 

SS: What were the causes of death?

 

RW: All sorts of physical illnesses, and that's part of the point.

You're getting respiratory problems, you're getting people dying of

incredibly high cholesterol counts, heart problems, diabetes. With

olanzapine (Zyprexa), one of the problems is that you're really

screwing up the core metabolic system. That's why you get these huge

weight gains, and you get the diabetes. Zyprexa basically disrupts the

machine that we are that processes food and extracts energy from that

food. So this very fundamental thing that we humans do is disrupted,

and at some point you just see all these pancreatic problems, faulty

glucose regulation, diabetes, etc. That's really a sign that you're

mucking with something very fundamental to life.

 

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.