Pubdate: Sat, 16 Mar 2002
Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer (WA)
Copyright: 2002 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Contact:  http://www.seattle-pi.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/408
Author: Keith Hoeller
Note: Keith Hoeller is director of the Center for the Study of Psychiatry 
Northwest. Soapbox columns are contributed by P-I readers.

Readers Soapbox

MIND-ALTERING DRUGS BOTH BANNED AND PUSHED

It is widely believed that for several decades now the American government 
has been waging a war against mind-altering drugs.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, law enforcement agencies and the 
criminal justice system all are charged with stopping American citizens 
from using mind-altering drugs. Perhaps as many as 1 million Americans are 
now being held in jail or prison on various drug charges.

But our local, state and federal governments are not in fact against 
Americans using mind-altering drugs at all. Their efforts are aimed at 
stopping Americans from using certain illegal, mind-altering drugs such as 
heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

At the same time, other government agencies (the National Institute of 
Mental Health, for example) are doing everything they can to get Americans 
to take legal, mind-altering drugs.

Indeed, the entire mental health movement has become one highly effective 
drug delivery system designed to persuade Americans to solve all their 
problems with prescription psychiatric drugs.

By now, the ideology of the mental health movement is well-known. Virtually 
every imaginable social problem, from unruly schoolboys (attention deficit 
disorder) to rebellious teens (oppositional defiant disorder) to shy adults 
(social anxiety disorder) is said to be caused by mental illness.

In turn, it is claimed that mental illness is a brain disease caused by a 
subtle chemical imbalance which is cured by this or that psychiatric wonder 
drug.

As luck would have it, along comes an Academy Award-nominated movie of the 
life of John Nash Jr., Nobel prize-winning mathematician.

"A Beautiful Mind" depicts Dr. Nash as a diagnosed schizophrenic who 
recovers with the help of the newer anti-psychotic medications heralded by 
the pharmaceutical industry and lay groups such as the National Alliance 
for the Mentally Ill, which, according to Mother Jones magazine, has taken 
at least $11 million from the drug companies.

They say that in war the first casualty is truth and it has certainly been 
killed here. For in fact the movie is based upon the biography of Nash by 
Columbia journalism professor Sylvia Nasar, who says in this week's 
Newsweek (March 11) that "moviegoers will be surprised to learn that 
powerful new drugs like Clozapine played no role in Nash's recovery."

Indeed, Nash stopped taking psychiatric drugs in 1970, prior to the 
invention of the so-called atypical anti-psychotic medications. Nash 
himself told Nasar that he "emerged from irrational thinking ultimately 
without medicine."

The false portrayal of Nash's life, as depicted by the movie, coincides 
nicely with the ideology of the mental health movement, which has at times 
appeared to be on a crusade to put nearly every man, woman and child in 
Amercia on some kind of psychiatric medication.

Many Americans are coerced into taking these drugs without adequate 
informed consent; many have even been forced to take them by American 
courts. Some clinical psychologists, who have long had a relatively safe 
and effective technique called talk therapy, have been clamoring for 
prescription privileges, and New Mexico this month became the first state 
to grant their wish.

In his new book, "Madness in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the 
Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill," journalist Robert Whitaker 
documents the heavy damage of the older anti-psychotics, whose use may have 
caused more than a million cases of the nerve-damaging illness called 
tardive dyskinesia, which Nasar says Nash avoided by quitting the drugs.

And Whitaker underscores the unjustified and hyperinflated claims made by 
the drug companies (and the lay groups) for their newer, so-called atypical 
anti-psychotics.

In fact, in America, where heavy medication is the norm for schizophrenia, 
recovery rates are low, while in other countries that use such drugs less 
often, recovery rates are far higher.

Americans use more illegal and legal mind-altering drugs than any other 
country in the world. And yet we continue with a national drug policy which 
sends the public two contradictory messages on psychoactive drugs. While 
one arm of the government is trying to stop people from voluntarily taking 
illegal mind-altering drugs, another arm is trying to get people to start 
taking legal mind-altering drugs.

And neither the drug companies nor the lay groups care if you take 
psychiatric drugs voluntarily or involuntarily. An odd irony of current 
reforms for drug offenders is that the call for treatment instead of jail 
time in effect means simply trading an illegal drug addiction for a legal one.

If we truly want to reform our war on drugs, we might start by returning to 
the hallmarks of medical ethics harking back to Hippocrates of ancient 
Greece: first, do no harm; informed consent; and patient autonomy.

It is the consistent and repeated violation of these hallowed principles of 
medical ethics that calls into question the claims of the mental health 
movement for parity.
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MAP posted-by: Beth