Raising
Doubts About Drugs
Calif. Hunger Strike Challenges Use of
Antidepressants
By Kimberly Edds
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, August 30, 2003; Page A08
PASADENA, Calif., Aug. 29 -- After two weeks, four mental
health advocates are still on a hunger strike, protesting the
widespread use of prescription drugs to treat mental illnesses and
challenging psychiatrists to document their rationale for
prescribing them.
Over the last few decades, doctors have embraced the view
that depression, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses result
from imbalances in brain chemistry, and they have treated such
illnesses with drugs intended to rebalance that chemistry. In recent
years, the use of antidepressant drugs has grown dramatically in the
United States, with the number of prescriptions nearly doubling
since 1998, according to the pharmaceutical consulting company IMS
Health.
As more people turn to antidepressants, mental health
experts and patient advocates are beginning to raise questions about
side effects and the potential for addiction.
The strikers are calling on some of the strongest voices in
the psychiatric profession, including the American Psychiatric
Association and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, to
provide concrete evidence that mental illnesses are the result of
brain chemistry imbalances. They also want to call attention to
alternative treatments.
"Millions of people are signing up for these prescriptions
because they are convinced they have a chemical imbalance. But there
is not one piece of evidence that can back that up," said David
Oaks, executive director of MindFreedom Support Coalition
International, or SCI, an organization of current and former
psychiatric patients that organized the strike.
A spokesman for the American Psychiatric Association
referred a reporter to a letter the association's medical director,
James H. Scully, wrote to Oaks on Aug. 12. "In recent years, there
has been substantial progress in understanding the neuroscientific
basis of many mental illnesses," it said. "Research offers hope and
must continue."
The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) did not
respond to several requests to comment, but Oaks made available an
e-mail he received today from Rick Birkel, NAMI's national executive
director.
"NAMI has never stated to my knowledge that 'mental
disorders are caused exclusively by biological factors,' " it said.
"Instead, we are saying that biological or genetic vulnerability
appears to be pre-requisite to serious mental disorder."
Birkel added that "mental disorders result from complex
interactions of many factors, including environmental forces,
stress, personality, social support, illness and injury."
Birkel's e-mail reflects a growing consensus in the
psychiatric establishment. Most psychiatrists say that complex
mental disorders are like arthritis and other chronic physical
ailments -- no less real because they cannot be spotted with
laboratory tests.
The hunger strikers, who include three former mental
patients, said that the responses were not satisfactory and that
they wanted a study and a diagnostic lab test that proves the
connection. Until then, they plan to continue their protest.
They began with six hunger strikers, but two, including
Oaks, left because of health difficulties. The remaining four have
been downing daily a dark red brew of juices from garlic, beets,
kale and carrots, and spending their time answering supporters'
e-mails and making phone calls to media outlets.
Hunger striker David Gonzalez said he spent two years
confined in an inpatient facility after being diagnosed with major
depression and, later, manic depression, and that he was forcibly
drugged during that time. He said the drugs impaired his eyesight
and memory.
"When someone has cancer, they don't lock the door behind
them, and they show them the tests," Gonzalez said. "But when
someone has a mental illness, they lock the door behind them and
show them no tests. When they lock that door behind me, I want to
know why."
Oaks said he, too, had been confined in institutions and
forcibly drugged for what was diagnosed as schizophrenia. He
recovered, he said, through the love and support of his family,
rather than drugs.
"People do not know what it's like to be on these drugs,"
Oaks said. "If you want to take it and it obliterates your pain,
that's one thing, but when you are pushed to be on it, it's like a
wrecking ball to your thoughts and feelings."
Studies have shown that daily exercise, psychotherapy and
even changes in diet and nutrition are as effective as, if not more
effective than, prescription drugs, said Stuart Shipko, a Pasadena
psychiatrist and panic disorder specialist who serves on an SCI
scientific panel. But there is not widespread support for such
treatments.
"We're overdiagnosing. How many of these supposed mental
illnesses are really just problems in your family life? They're
anxious, and they're being put in a chemical straitjacket," Shipko
said.
© 2003 The Washington Post
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