Psychiatry Good and Bad
Drug Bias
Psychiatry in recent years has focused on the biochemistry of
neurotransmitters, as revealed by drug action in experimental animals. Chemical
theories of depression, for example, are often over-simplifications, based on
observations of altered neurotransmitter synthesis and function in the brains of
mice and rats. It has not been possible to study the living chemistry of the
human brain; hence, we do not really know how relevant animal data is.
The study of antidepressant drugs remains an abstract contribution to our
general understanding that different brain systems utilize different chemical
transmitters in highly organized, complex circuits to produce our mental states
and behavior. The increasing use of antidepressant and other psychotropic drugs,
is not, however, a favorable trend The root intellectual problem with
psychiatry is that there is no coherent infrastructure of knowledge about what
humans do, how they do it and why they do it. There is too little real biology
in psychiatry. The use of drugs to modify brain function passes as biology but
is not linked to any coherent understanding of brain function. Since the notions
of drug interaction with the brain are all abstractions, arriving from research
on animal brains, these ideas are disconnected from the biological reality lived
by patients day after day. Psychiatrists, for example, will add chemicals to
patients daily input of chemicals but show little or no interest in other
chemicals that that the patient is inhaling and ingesting.
I am convinced, for example, that the food intake of a person has a
determining effect on the way their brain functions, but some psychiatrists are
hostile to this insight. A reasonable approach, in my view, is to examine and
modify a patients diet, improve nutrition and remove toxic chemicals in the air
before prescribing drugs, but psychiatrists rarely take this approach. The use
of psychotropic drug use would appear to be somewhat rational and regulated, but
is largely an improvisatory and amateurish exercise rather than a coherent
application of biological knowledge. You could argue that the use of drugs to
modify brain function has some benefits for some patients, but prescription drug
use can cause dysphoria, mental and neurological disorders. You could easily
argue that the negative effects of psychotropic drugs exceed benefits.
Too many patients receive prescriptions for multiple psychotropic drugs, a
scrambled eggs kind of psychopharmacology. A simple rule of thumb for patients
is that one well-chosen psychotropic drug has a chance of being beneficial
long-term; more than one drug at a time will usually cause brain function to
deteriorate. Several drugs at once confuse the mind, may be dangerous and may
cause death by accident or suicide.
"Nearly 90,000 adults go to emergency rooms each year for side effects of
psychiatric medications, and a few specific drugs may be to blame for 57% of
those visits. The study estimated that sedatives and anxiolytics were most often
to blame, causing nearly 31,000 annual emergency department visits. Following
those, antidepressants account for more than 25,000 visits, antipsychotics for
nearly 22,000, lithium salts for 3620 and stimulants for 2779. The ten drugs
that were implicated in most of the emergencies are the following, according to
the research team: zolpidem tartrate (Ambien), a sedative; quetiapine fumarate
(Seroquel), an atypical antipsychotic; alprazolam (Xanax), an anxiolytic;
lorazepam (Ativan), a sedative and anxiolytic; haloperidol, an antipsychotic;
clonazepam, a sedative and anxiolytic; trazodone, an antidepressant, anxiolytic
and sedative; citalopram hydrobromide (Celexa), an antidepressant; lithium
salts, a mood stabilizer; and risperidone, an antipsychotic." Hampton et al of
the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. Ten Drugs
Cause Majority of ER Visits in Adults for Adverse Psych Med Effects. JAMA
Psychiatry 2014
Biologists, on the other hand, think in terms of populations, food supply,
seasons, weather, and social-behaviors, and do field studies which reveal
patterns of adaptation to specific environments. The biologist sees every living
creature connected to and interacting with his/her environment. Anyone who has
worked with animals or fish in closed environments knows how critical
environmental conditions and diet are in determining both the behavior and the
physical status of the residents. When a fish in an aquarium displays psychotic
behavior, you do not call a fish psychiatrist; you check the oxygen
concentration, temperature, and pH of the water. You have to clean the tank and
change the fish diet.
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