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Overview
Many people today suffer from mental health issues. In fact, there is a modern upswing in these problems that’s almost an epidemic. How did this happen?
We’re familiar with epidemics that spread from one person to another. However, it’s possible for an epidemic to be the result of many different factors coming together at once. This is a story about how chance events, private interests, pharmaceutical companies and others came together to create a mental illness epidemic in America.
In this article, you’ll learn about the history of psychoactive drugs. You’ll also learn why there’s a low status for psychiatry and how that led to mass medication. Finally, you’ll discover how much government spending on mental health has increased over the past 14 years.
Big Idea #1: Popular psychiatric medicines were introduced without proper testing.
It’s likely that you or someone you know is taking a prescription medicine for emotional reasons. Statistics show that one out of every eight Americans takes psychiatric medication, including children and infants.
In the past, there were fewer drugs to treat common mental illnesses. However, since 1985, drug sales have increased significantly in the United States.
That is big business today, but we need to look at how it came about. Doctors were looking for miracle drugs that could cure infectious diseases, but they accidentally invented psychoactive drugs in the process.
After WWII, researchers found that certain drugs could affect the central nervous system. While testing those compounds to cure disease, they discovered that some of them caused a person’s body and emotions to change dramatically without making the person lose consciousness.
Usually, drugs are developed by finding the cause of a disease and then developing a drug to cure that disease. This is how insulin was discovered for diabetes patients.
New psychoactive drugs were not tested well before going to market. The pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French tested its new mental illness magic bullet, Thorazine, on less than 150 psychiatric patients before applying for FDA approval. The president of the company claimed that Thorazine had been thoroughly tested on over 5,000 animals and was proven safe for human administration.
In 1954, Thorazine was put on a drugstore counter for anxiety and bipolar disorder.
Big Idea #2: Psychiatric medications can cause severe side effects and long-lasting dependency.
One of the biggest problems with limited testing is that it doesn’t give a drug enough time to develop side effects. We now know that drugs have many side effects, so we need to test them more extensively before approving them for use.
Psychiatric medications can cause long-lasting changes to a person’s brain. They can also have negative side effects.
Antidepressants are used to treat depression. They increase serotonin, a natural chemical in the brain that helps nerve cells communicate with each other. However, this can cause episodes of mania if there is too much of it.
Antipsychotic medications work by blocking a neurotransmitter called dopamine. But reducing dopamine can have negative side effects as well, such as tremors and impaired motor function in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Other common side effects include memory loss and reduced learning ability, as well as weight gain, suicidal thoughts and apathy. These symptoms are often treated with yet more drugs, leaving many patients taking multiple pills every day.
Many people are prescribed drugs for depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders. These prescriptions can lead to additional drug use when the patient experiences side effects from one prescription. This is not uncommon; some patients take multiple drugs per day to treat their symptoms.
