Truth, Lies, and Psychotropic Medication.

Good report from 60 Minutes (CBS) summarizing evidence that exercise and placebo pills are just as effective as psychiatric medications for treating mild and moderate cases of depression. By discarding clinical trials that don’t show the results they like, pharmaceutical corporations are able to manipulate the public’s attitudes about the effectiveness of their drugs over other less harmful, less expensive interventions. Gross distortions of the truth about psychiatric medications, i.e. that they are uniquely effective and necessary for treating emotional problems, have become widely accepted as a result. (Pfizer, GSK, and Eli Lilly declined to be interviewed for the story…)

For more detailed information about the controversy around using placebos in the clinical setting, see this New Yorker article by Michael Specter. For a broader investigation into how the pharmaceutical industry, the psychiatric profession, and others have successfully pushed totally unnecessary psychiatric medication on the greater public, including a review of the evidence showing how taking unnecessary psychotropics can exacerbate mild to moderate psychological problems (when discontinued) by creating chemical imbalances in the brain, see Robert Whitaker’s very important 2010 book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. (Psychotropic medication is appropriate for more severe forms of mental illness. Never discontinue medication abruptly; ask your doctor about terminating pharmaceutical treatment safely.)

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