IMPORTANT FACTS

1. Psychiatric drugs have become a panacea for the pressures and stresses of modern living, pushed heavily by psychiatrists into schools, nursing homes, drug rehabilitation centers and prisons.

2. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are now known to potentially cause neurological disorders, including disfiguring facial and body tics. Sexual dysfunction has affected 60% of people taking them.

3. The latest antipsychotic drugs can cause respiratory arrest, heart attacks, diabetes and inflammation of the pancreas.

4. More than 100 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in 2002. Worldwide antidepressant sales have reached more than $19.5 billion. International antipsychotics sales are now $12 billion a year.

5. Despite the devastating side effects, in France, one in seven prescriptions covered by insurance includes a psychotropic drug and over 50% of the unemployed—1.8 million—take such drugs.

CHAPTER ONE Pushing Drugs as ‘Medicines’

What’s happening in the training of psychiatrists and in the quality of a psychiatrist is that they have become drug pushers. They have forgotten how to sit down and talk to patients as to what their problems are,” states psychiatrist Walter Afield.

Fifty years ago, people understood a drug to be one of two things: a substance legally prescribed by a medical doctor to help treat physical disease—in other words, a medication; or, an illegal substance which characteristically caused addiction, and could lead to a marked change in consciousness—such as the “street” drugs, heroin and opium.

Most people know that illegal drugs are one of society’s worst enemies, bringing crime and its associated ills to our streets, communities and schools. In the last few decades, however, a new breed of drug has moved into mainstream society. These drugs have become so much a part of life that many find it difficult to consider living even a day without them.

Psychiatric drugs have become a panacea for the pressures and stresses of modern living, used extensively in schools, nursing homes, drug rehabilitation centers and prisons. They are relied on to “help” with everything from weight control, and mathematical and writing problems, to flagging self-confidence, anxiety, sleeping disorders and minor day-to-day upsets.

While medical drugs commonly treat, prevent or cure disease or improve health, psychiatric drugs at best suppress symptoms— symptoms that return once the drug wears off. Like illicit drugs, they provide no more than a temporary escape from life’s problems. But psychiatric drugs are also habit-forming and addictive. Withdrawal from them can be far more difficult than from illegal drugs. The clearest evidence of the similarities between psychiatric and illegal drugs is the fact that addiction to psychiatric drugs now rivals illegal drug addiction as the No.1 drug problem in many parts of the world.

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