The Standardization of Psychiatry

October, 25, 2021 | 12 Comments

Comments

  1. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral …

    In Topical Parlance, “Cold Gun” “Hot Gun”, a shot is fired from a gun that is not a blank –

    It used to be said a lot that Doctors were playing “Russian Roulette” with patients’ lives when prescribing antidepressants like Paroxetine with little or no discussions about adverse events or how to safely come off them. In most instances where serious problems started happening, the Doctor would not believe what he was hearing and from this a whole ‘Harmed Community’ has developed.

    It would be OK if the drugs were ‘blanks’, but they are not and it seems utterly ruthless for any psychiatrist to deny how dangerous psychotropic drugs can be.

    The ANTLER Study

    Prof Sir Simon Wessely, Regius Chair of Psychiatry, King’s College London, said:

    “This is a very important study.  It mirrors one of the first randomised controlled trials ever undertaken in depression, which found some benefit to staying on antidepressants for at least six months after you had recovered from a depressive illness.  Now we know this applies for an even longer period.  On the other hand, the other good news is that if you do want to come off antidepressants for whatever reason, this can also be done safely over a couple of months.  So now patients taking long term antidepressants can make an even more informed choice than before.  Yes you can come off medication, provided it’s done slowly, but there is an small but not insignificant risk of another illness.  As ever there is no right answer, but this study provides more information to assist people in making up their minds.”

    This is death-defying nonsense. He has been playing with his ‘Holster’ for far too long.
    He has spoken quite clearly that he finds antidepressants ‘safe and effective’.
    To then come on and to ‘assist people in making up their minds’ is a crash-course.
    ‘safely over a couple of months’ is disingenuous baloney.

    Wendy Burn and her letter to The Times was a ‘real-gun’ moment.
    Wendy Dolin flew thousands of miles to give a presentation about Akathisia and how this condition led to the death of Stewart Dolin.
    She couldn’t even bring herself to acknowledge Wendy in the RCP Stopping Antidepressants.

    Louis Appleby and his view on Akathisia to Dee Doherty.
    A real smoking-gun.

    In the Real-World-Corral these ‘antler-antics’ are terrifying and another terrific lecture comes our way, casually thrown away in end of lecture comments –

    “Cold Gun” “Hot Gun” …

    • Professor Glyn Lewis
      HC Deb 27 July 1998 vol 317 cc38-9W38W

      §Mr. Hancock 

      To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, pursuant to his answer of 29 June 1998,Official Report, column 7, if he will make a statement on the medical career and research background of Professor Glyn Lewis. [52064]

      https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1998/jul/27/professor-glyn-lewis

      Most common antidepressant barely helps improve depression symptoms, ‘shocking’ trial finds

      https://news-media.top/most-common-antidepressant-barely-helps-improve-depression-symptoms-shocking-trial-finds/

      Professor Glyn Lewis, who led the research at University College London, said: “We were shocked and surprised when we did our analysis.

      “There is absolutely no doubt this is an unexpected result.’

      “Our primary hypothesis was that it would affect those depressive symptoms at six weeks and we didn’t find that.

      “We definitely need better treatments for depression, and we need more research in this area.”

      He suggested that new, more effective classes of antidepressants could be based on ketamine, psilocybin, the psychedelic in magic mushrooms, and anti-inflammatories.

      It is thought that roughly four million people in England are long-term users of antidepressants.

      Prescribing data shows that SSRI’s such as sertraline make up 54 per cent of antidepressant prescriptions.

      Scientists have responded to the new study by pointing out that some of the patients had very mild symptoms of depression to start with, making it less likely that sertraline would cause an improvement.

      However, others have pointed out that this is exactly the basis upon which GPs tend to hand out the drugs in practice.

      Dr Gemma Lewis, who co-authored the new research, said: “I think it’s really important to understand that anxiety symptoms are very, very common among people with depression.”

      She added: “It appears that people taking the drug are feeling less anxious, so they feel better overall, even if their depressive symptoms were less affected.
      “We hope that we have cast new light on how antidepressants work, as they may be primarily affecting anxiety symptoms such as nervousness, worry and tension, and taking longer to affect depressive symptoms.”

      Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, Chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: “It is well-established that it often takes a while for patients to feel the full benefits of modern antidepressants and that they work best when taken for significant periods of time, which is one reason why doctors will often review patients after several weeks of use and then prescribe a fairly long course of the drugs, if they appear to be beneficial.”

      A randomised controlled trial assessing the use of citalopram, sertraline, fluoxetine and mirtazapine in preventing relapse in primary care patients who are taking long-term maintenance antidepressants (ANTLER: ANTidepressants to prevent reLapse in dEpRession): study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

      Larisa Duffy, Faye Bacon, Caroline S. Clarke, Yvonne Donkor, Nick Freemantle,Simon Gilbody, Rachael Hunter, Tony Kendrick, David Kessler, Michael King, Paul Lanham,Gemma Lewis, 
      Dee Mangin,Louise Marston, Michael Moore, Irwin Nazareth, Nicola Wiles & Glyn Lewis 

      https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-019-3390-8#:~:text=%20Methods%2Fdesign%20%201%20Study%20design.%20The%20ANTLER,method%20of%20recruitment%20will%20answer%20a…%20More%20

      experts

      86 on

      https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5a8ff7d860d03e7f57eb26dc

      The Back Stories…

      • Going Ga Ga – See a GP specialising in Medications … swivelling a narrative

        An epidemic of anxiety among the over-60s is unearthed after Dr Ellie Cannon revealed her own 15-year mental health struggle

        By EVE SIMMONS FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
        PUBLISHED: 22:00, 30 October 2021 | UPDATED: 22:03, 30 October 2021

        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10147565/Dr-Ellie-Cannons-mental-health-confession-unearthed-epidemic-anxiety-60s.html

        The article has unleashed a hidden tide of anxiety disorders among older adults.

        ‘Anxiety is a very common problem we see in older patients. Medication to treat anxiety and depression is among the most common I prescribe,’ says Dr Clare Gerarda, a GP specialising in psychiatry. 

        ‘As you get older, you’re more likely to suffer serious health conditions and the stress of physical illness often triggers mental health problems. 

        If It’s Not ‘One’ It’s The ‘Other’…

        “Unearthing” probable calamitous prescribing to the elderly – just gaga…

  2. I watched “The Standardization of Psychiatry” on Youtube and tried to leave a comment.
    It was deleted though I tried Several times.

    So I left it on my blog ( https://hellaheaven-ana.blogspot.com/2021/10/my-comment-on-youtube-was-deleted-it-is.html ) and now here:

    “Thank you Dr. Healy.
    You always give the broad picture of everything. Never heard of a physician that put the political, economical and cultural aspect of what they are explaining.

    “So tiny and…” my conclusion is always the opposite: “So tiny and causing so many illness.”
    I beg your pardon? 20:37 “… market Zoloft neither the names in the authorship line nor the people who run the trial, nor the ghostwriters, nor the FDA or the MHRA will have seen the data from these trials.”

    “So I´ve written to NICE, and, MHRA, and EMA, and FDA, all the major journals, all the politicians, the minister of health in all the departments of health in the western European archipelago, – that’s England and Ireland for those who weren’t sure what it is, – and they all agree that the literature was ghost written and there’s no access to the clinical trial data. Their response is to take the escape route that I offered them which is that it’s not our job to police the medical literature raising the question of whose job is this.”

    Stop the world, the planet… the universe.
    I’m glad I still have some innocence left and indignation.
    Funny that UK Parliament talk about ghost writers in their 2005 review “The Influence of Pharmaceutical Industry”.
    Suicide ideation not related to the depression but as a side effect is also there.
    https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmhealth/42/42.pdf

  3. Just an aside about schizophrenia being on the decline, and why psychiatrists are not curious about the causes. To listen to leading psychiatrists in the USA, you would think schizophrenia was 1) at least as common as ever, if not more so, and 2) totally treatable thanks to amazing advances in Brain Science – but only if Caught Early!

    I suspect the flood of new “anti-psychotic” medications has led to a real dumbing-down of the whole medical profession, shrinks especially. They no longer realize what a wide variety of factors might cause a person to hear voices, develop “paranoid” fears or otherwise loosen their grip on reality for a time. No, it is all “psychosis,” which is conflated with “schizophrenia,” so that every patient is assumed to have a primary Brain Disease. A lot of this seems like “reasoning from pill to illness.” If I’m giving Anti-Psychotics to treat this illness, then it must be a Psychotic Illness, right?

    This is not a new problem – in fact one of the purposes of the DSM-III was supposed to be fixing such diagnostic sloppiness. Especially the American tendency to label any serious mental-emotional problem as Schizophrenia. Freudians and other “psychodynamic” shrinks had a very bad case of this disorder, and “biological psychiatry” was supposed to cure it by making definitions more scientific. Oh well.

    The new phase of the disorder is an obsession with psychotic or even “pre-psychotic” symptoms in teens and young adults, or what is labeled First Episode Psychosis. The very name assumes the person’s current crisis is the “first episode” of a lifelong illness, which should be arrested or at least managed with long-acting injectable antipsychotics. As near as I can tell, most of the money in psychiatry is flowing into these very lucrative injections, which can force “medication compliance” for up to a year at a time. That poses a risk of turning “lifelong illness” into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  4. How to insult a GP -or maybe some would like even more decision making removed .

    Pulse Today

    A major London hospital trust has launched a trial requiring GPs to use advice and guidance (A&G) services before referring patients.

    The trial currently spans 13 specialities but if successful, the measure ‘could become the default’ for all services across the trust.

    Barts Health NHS Trust announced last week that ‘from this month, GPs wishing to refer a patient into some Barts Health services will first need to consult with hospital specialists’ via A&G.

    It said: ‘The change is being trialled across 13 specialities and could become the default for all of our services.’

    A Barts spokesperson told Pulse that GPs will no longer be able to make ‘direct referrals’ to these specialities and that A&G will become the ‘single point of access’ to the service.

    GPs will have to request the A&G function on the e-referral service (eRS) used by the trust and the request will be converted into a referral ‘where appropriate’, they added.

    They will receive a reply from the hospital specialist ‘within five days’, either with advice on how to manage the patient themselves or informing them that the hospital will organise an appointment, the trust said.

  5. Why is it that when I take my B12 shot it hardly hurts at all, but when I take my Abilify shot it is sore for at least a day or two? My suspicion is that my body likes the B12 a lot more than the Abilify.

    Among many reasons to be disturbed about taking psychotropics, this is one of the worst. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18626887/

    It appears to be published around 2008, Has anyone made any progress in this field of research? From what I can tell so far, (and what I vastly suspect) this only scratches the surface of the biological effects of Psychotropics. Patients need to be aware of what kind of supplements to take to counteract the adverse biological effects of psychotropics. They also need to be aware that science is still learning about what these drugs really do and that there may be unknown unintended consequences to taking them.

    If psychiatry is to ever resurrect itself in a popular way as a moral practice, it should take a much stronger role in educating the pro and con realities of psychiatric drugs to the patient and the public. Informed consent should be one of the corner stones in a doctor patient relationship within Psychiatry. If Psychiatry does not strongly adopt open and transparent informed consent very soon, It may continue to have ungodly amounts of power over some of the most vulnerable in society but it will likely flush its respectability as a real medical and scientific enterprise down the toilet in cut time.

    Many of us who are on the short end of the societal stick and who feel (rightly so) stuck in the system, clearly see the rotten termite infested side of mental “health”. We feel the insane effects of the drugs and we see the stubborn desire of those who prescribe to not look for or even consider alternative treatments.

    We are told over and over again the false narrative about our “chemical imbalance”. (often by hospital staff who are greatly pressured to deceive the patient because their job depends on pushing what is prescribed) The truth about the DSM is generally hidden especially in the hospital as is any inconvenient truth about psychiatry. If people are being deceived or coerced so that they adhere to possible life saving and necisary psychotropic treatment, (weather it is life saving or necisary comes down to a debate I am not informed enough to take on like someone like Robert Whitaker would) that means in the case of mental health, sometimes (or actually quite often) the ends justify the means. Rarely does this not become unethical or immoral. At best it is a very dangerous slippery slope. At worst, well, who really wants to take that risk? (obviously mental health but one has to wonder, who really has the mental illness here?)

    Often those of us stuck in the system naturally despair over endless dirty treatments for our “incurable” disability (often created or exacerbated by the drugs). We then are offered more “medication” for our “depression”. When we are doing fine we are instructed to stay on our meds, when we are not fine we are given more meds. When we try to explain this Chinese handcuff downward spiral, no one seems to give a flying (well) thought about it. Everyone around us with any power seems to adamantly want to obey and get direct instruction from the Psychiatrist or any medical “expert” on our care. The psychiatrists however tend to heavily rely on social and economic pressure to make their judgement, knowing full well (but not often admitting) that their decisions (some easier than others) are really a highly educated guesses.

    No one knows or has an example of a truly healthy brain (not even the Psychiatrist, believe me, I asked). So really, general Psychiatry is just a very dangerous pharmacological (often poly-pharmacological) wack-a-mole guessing game to any symptom that appears to be undesirable or perceived as dangerous. The result being an explosion of docile or angry unemployed institutionalized chemically sterilized (or in many cases sexually excited) and often chemically lobotomized highly medicated individuals with a plethora of neurological and biological problems. Psychiatrists know this is a problem, but they are continuously swept up in the social and economic currents that keep the machine going. They need to develop a moral backbone. Really, they need to have a heart which can be hard to instill in a big Pharma influenced academic environment. Doing so also very well could mean a slimmer wallet, and there lies the rub for many in the industry.

    I do however see some hope. Much of the younger generation, as usual in any society, is very counter cultural. Which means more consideration for alternative medicine. I also see big Pharma becoming more desperate and possibly more dangerous for social and economic reasons, which would create a societal backlash. I see more of a revolving door between idealistic psychiatrists and economically driven Psychiatrists as some old Psychiatrists wake up and some new blood comes in for the promise of big paychecks.

    I see websites like Mad in America continuing and likely growing in an underground fashion, and I see the obsession with the established poisonous medical industry dying a very hard death. (probably not unlike the kind of death many chronic psych patients face) I see more research in the promising field of how the microbiome affects biology and mental health. I believe individualized medicine is coming with a balanced approach with what is now considered conventional medicine in the most extreme cases, but the bread and butter in what we now call alternative medicine most often for preventative purposes. I see the current technology of pharmaceuticals being treated soon one day much the same way we treat artificial sweeteners. I predict that a growing body of evidence will show that nearly all current mainstream psychotropic pills are dangerous to your microbiome and ultimately to ones body and that LAI’s as we know them today are overall toxic to human biology.

    I don’t quite know where psychiatry will go. There seems to be some promise in patented microbiological living or somewhat living organisms like viruses, bacteria and fungi. The old rift between psychiatrists and chiropractors may completely disappear if psychiatry starts looking at the benefits of natural supplements. Maybe psychiatry will go back to its roots of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. Maybe new drugs will come out that are not so neurotoxic. The big question I have is, can big Pharma ever improve on mother nature, or really can anyone? I guess that comes down to the evolution intelligent design debate which for me gets pretty complicated.

  6. Good to read something that takes common sense into account.
    I clearly remember taking one Prozac pill and feeling actively suicidal; Effexor caused me to be ever so calm (and thrilled to be) for maybe an hour, then the flip side with extreme agitation; Remeron, Zoloft, Paxil, and others each had a very different effect. It was all like going to IKEA, a extended difficult experience but a few absolute helpful people and treasures along the way.

  7. I.m tossing up whether to rummage through their tool box as The GMC is notorious for taking
    months which they can drag into years using various ploys on past experience of working as an advocate, to deal with the predictable runaround
    Your GMC enquiry (The Call centre handler -sorry ‘Contact Centre Advisor ‘might have spelt my name correctly by the way – ) But worth having another concern on the GMC records along with a previous complaint by a group concerned about her.
    gmc@gmc-uk.org
    11:24 AM (1 hour ago)
    to me
    Dear Suzanne
    Thank you for your email about your concerns.
    If you have serious concerns about a doctor, you should raise them with us via our concerns tool which you will find in the concerns section of our website.
    These concerns could include:
    serious or repeated mistakes in patient care
    failure to respond reasonably to patient needs (including referring for further investigations where necessary)
    violence, sexual assault or indecency
    fraud or dishonesty
    a serious criminal offence
    abuse of professional position, eg an improper sexual relationship with a patient
    discrimination against patients, colleagues and others
    Please be advised that you will also need the doctor’s full name and GMC number in order to submit your concern to us.

    If you would like to discuss this further, please call us using the number below or reply to this email.
    Yours sincerely
    Claire
    Claire Hall
    Contact Centre Adviser,
    Registration and Revalidation Directorate
    Telephone: 0161 923 6602 (+44 161 923 6602 from outside the UK)
    Website: http://www.gmc-uk.org

    • Re . Dr Ellie Cannon
      29 August 2019

      ‘In an era of fake news, TV doctor Dr Ellie Cannon is the much-needed antidote to health myths.
      She is also a blogger for Pulse and has tackled issues including the anti-vax movement and fighting cervical cancer.’

      Decided to go ahead with complaint to the GMC re misinformation propagated by Ellie Cannon GP re ADs
      plus lack of response fro the sugery manager – there is an obligation to respond CCG is trying again

      Hello All (to madintheuk)
      just a bit of an update – Ellie and the surgery manager have an obligation to reply.
      Complaint has been forwarded to GMC – will take ages but will keep you informed
      All the best – take care
      susanne

      ———- Forwarded message ———
      From: COMPLAINTS (NHS NORTH CENTRAL LONDON CCG)
      Date: Wed, Nov 10, 2021 at 5:08 PM
      Complaint regarding the seriously misleading information broadcast by Ellie Cannon

      Cc: COMPLAINTS (NHS NORTH CENTRAL LONDON CCG)

      Dear (susanne)
      Thank you for your response.
      GPs are not employed by Clinical Commissioning Groups for their general practice work, and we are also not directly responsible for the performance management of GPs. We are co-commissioners with NHS England. We will forward on your complaint to ITV and make sure you are copied in. ITV is responsible for the information that they broadcast on their programmes, and for ensuring that a balanced perspective is presented, so we feel that they would be best placed to respond.

      In regards to the complaint you have made about the practice’s contact information, our primary care team will follow this up with the practice to ensure it is addressed.
      Best wishes
      Brett
      Brett Vallance

      PALS, Complaints & FOI Manager
      North Central London CCG

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