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Summer 2010 asylum summer 2010 Volumepage 1 17 Number 2 £3.50 Sales and subscriptions Tel 01989 763900 www.pccs-books.co.uk Information Asylum Collective www.asylumonline.net the magazine for democratic psychiatry WHAT EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT PSYCHIATRIC MEDICATION page 2 asylum summer 2010 An international magazine for democratic psychiatry, psychology, and community development Incorporating the Newsletter of Psychology Politics Resistance the magazine for democratic psychiatry Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2010 ISSN 0955 2030 © Asylum and Asylum Associates CONTENTS Limbrick Centre, Limbrick Rd Sheffield, S6 2PE THE TRUTH ABOUT PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS [email protected] Joanna Moncrieff 3 Executive Editor: BOOK REVIEW Phil Virden: [email protected] Drug-Induced Dementia by Grace Jackson 5 General Editors: Prof Alec Jenner PSYCHIATRY AND THE TOXIC DRUG INDUSTRY Lin Bigwood: [email protected] Justice Lover 6 Business Manager: COMBATING THE DRUG COMPANIES’ Peter Bullimore: [email protected] DRUG-PUSHING Poetry & Creative Writing: Evelyn Pringle 7 Clare Shaw: [email protected] Phil Thomas: [email protected] PSYCHIATRIC MEDICATION: Members of Asylum Collective: SHOOTING IN THE DARK Jim Campbell: [email protected] Phil Virden 9 Jacqui Dillon: [email protected] David Harper: [email protected] THE ADHD FRAUD: CHEMICAL HOLOCAUST Paul Hammersley: FOR CHILDREN [email protected] From an interview with Fred A Baughman Jnr MD 16 Ian Parker: [email protected] TURNING CHILDREN INTO MENTAL PATIENTS: Helen Spandler: [email protected] ADHD IN THE UK Stephen Ticktin: [email protected] George Fowler 20 Design: Old Dog Graphics PSYCHOTROPIC MEDICATIONS: REMEDIES OR Administration & Distribution: POISONS? THE EVIDENCE FROM PCCS Books PHARMACOGENETICS 2 Cropper Row Catherine Clarke 23 Alton Rd Ross-on-Wye, HR9 5LA MORE DRUGGING, LESS RIOTS? SURVEILLANCE Subscriptions (see below for rates): AND TRANQUILLISATION vs PROTEST www.pccs-books.co.uk Guy Holmes 27 [email protected] tel: 01989 763 900 fax: 01989 763 901 HOW TO WITHDRAW FROM PSYCHIATRIC Front Cover Picture: DRUGS Kyle Reynolds: www.kylereynolds.ca Peter Lehmann 29 Graphics and backgrounds on pp 4, 5, 9, 23-27: Aidan Shingler Asylum is produced by Asylum Associates and the Asylum Collective. © Asylum Collective and Asylum Associates on behalf of authors. Asylum Associates is a not-for-profit workers’ cooperative. The Asylum Collective is open to anyone who wants to help produce and develop the magazine, working in a spirit of equality. Please contact us if you want to help in any way. The views expressed within are those of individual contributors and not necessarily those of the Asylum Collective or Asylum Associates. Articles are accepted in good faith and every effort is made to ensure fairness and veracity. Annual Subscriptions — print, incl. delivery — online at www.pccs-books.co.uk, by phone: 01989 763 900 or send cheque payable to ‘PCCS Books’ to PCCS Books, 2 Cropper Row, Alton Rd, Ross-on-Wye, HR9 5LA UK Individual £14.00 Overseas Individual £16.50 Bulk orders/Trade/Resale call 01989 763 900 UK Organisations £26.00 Overseas Organisations £30.00 for information on discounts Digital subscriptions — each issue as a colour PDF — available from www.pccs-books.co.uk UK Individuals £12.93 (inc VAT) Overseas Individuals £11.00 VAT payable on digital products by UK Organisations £23.50 (inc VAT) Overseas Organisations £20.00 UK customers asylum summer 2010 page 3 variations which give rise to differing responses to the EDITORIAL various prescribed medications – it is the study of how our differently constituted bodies are able or unable to take up drugs. There is now clear evidence that many CAUTION! DO NOT ASSUME mental health patients – and probably the neediest – are THE MEDICATION WORKS AS INTENDED simply unable to metabolise their medications, and are, Modern societies are highly medicated. You have a in fact, poisoned by them. health problem? Pop a pill. While ever-inflating health This is the topic of Catherine Clarke’s important budgets may sometimes benefit patients, they always article, towards the back of this issue. She notes that benefit the drug companies. Since the Second World pharmacogenetic tests are routinely carried out prior War, pharmaceuticals have proved even more profitable to treatment in general medicine, for example, with the than the arms industry, the next highest performing medications prescribed for arthritis, HIV, cancer, Crohn’s sector in the economy. Mental health products make up and heart disease. This is to assess the degree of efficacy or a significant part of pharmaceuticals. And all manner of inefficacy of the proposed drug for each particular patient, political and professional parties have an interest in the and to reduce seriously adverse reactions. In those areas unquestioned growth of drugs sales. of medicine, the tests only take about 90 seconds and can In this issue we explore the dubious status of mental be done at an out-patient clinic for just £10. health medication. At last, with the arrival of global meta- So it seems that testing for the capacity for each studies of the drugs in the field (sometimes comparing mental health patient to metabolise and excrete a over one hundred pieces of research on one drug) what for proposed medication could be fairly cheap, and it would many years was known from a small number of studies soon pay off by vastly improving treatment and cutting is now becoming crystal clear: psychiatric medication is the rate of iatrogenic illness. And yet there are no plans actually inappropriate or ineffectual for most patients most to introduce pharmacogenetic tests into mental health of the time. But for decades it has also been known that medicine in the UK. Mental health remains the Cinderella too often psychiatric drugging is also positively harmful. of medicine. Just as in the 1960s and 1970s, when they Now science is making it clearer why some patients closed their eyes to the medically induced epidemic of do seem to respond well enough to psychiatric medication tardive dyskinesia, policy makers in the NHS do not seem but a greater number show no positive response or a interested in the uselessness of their treatments or the definitely negative mental or physical health response. continuing drug-induced harm and suffering caused to Pharmacogenetics is the clinical testing of genetic this particular kind of patient. Phil Virden, Executive Editor 1: SEVERAL INCONVENIENT TRUTHS The Truth about Psychiatric Drugs Dr Joanna Moncrieff For decades we have been sold a myth about the nature Table 1: Alternative Models of Drug Action of psychiatric drugs. We have been told that they can compensate for chemical imbalances or help to correct Disease-centred model Drug-centred model particular psychiatric conditions. This myth suggests that Drugs help correct an Drugs create an taking a drug is necessarily a good thing because the drug abnormal brain state abnormal brain state helps to reverse an underlying disease that is the cause of the Therapeutic effects of Therapeutic effects derive symptoms or problems. This idea of what psychiatric drugs drugs derived from their from the impact of the do has been used to convince millions of people worldwide effects on an underlying drug-induced state on behavio- that they need to take psychiatric drugs to function normally. disease process ural and emotional problems In my most recent book I show that not only is there little or no Paradigm: insulin for diabetes Paradigm: alcohol for social evidence to support this way of thinking but, in addition, this anxiety view has blinded us to the real nature of psychiatric drugs. It obscures the fact that, like cannabis, alcohol and heroin, physical medicine. For example, insulin therapy compensates psychiatric drugs are psychoactive: while taking them, they for the underlying deficiency of insulin in diabetes, antibiotics alter the way the brain functions – and sometimes forever. target bacteria, and anti-asthma drugs help to reverse the lung In order to provide a clear way to think about the nature problems that cause wheezing. Even painkillers, although of psychiatric drugs I have outlined two alternative ways of they do not target the underlying disease, work by acting on understanding how they might affect people with psychiatric the biological pathways that give rise to pain. problems. I have called these different ‘models’ of drug action Psychiatric drugs are presented as acting in the same the ‘disease-centred’ model and the ‘drug-centred’ model. way. This is reflected in the way those drugs are named: Their contrasting features are summarised in Table 1. thus antidepressants are thought to help correct the disease The disease-centred model is the standard view that process that leads to depression, antipsychotics are thought psychiatric drugs work by correcting an underlying disease to rectify the abnormality that gives rise to the symptoms of of the brain. According to this model, drug treatment makes schizophrenia or psychosis, and mood stabilisers are believed your brain more normal by helping to rectify the underlying to correct an underlying instability of mood. problem. This model is based on the way most drugs work in The alternative way of thinking about psychiatric drugs is page 4 asylum summer 2010 to see them first and foremost as psychoactive substances. volunteers who have taken them as part of research studies. Like all psychoactive drugs, they distort the functioning of the In the early days of the neuroleptics, many psychiatrists nervous system and by doing so they produce altered mental attributed their therapeutic effects to their ability to induce states. When we think of recreational drugs we refer to these Parkinson’s disease. Some psychiatrists believed it was altered mental states as ‘intoxication’. Psychiatric drugs also necessary to use doses that were high enough to produce the produce states of intoxication.