Crazy Nation

Because I suffer from visual and auditory hallucinations and have for most of my life, both my primary care physician and mental health counselor recently have suggested that I consider a pharmaceutical remedy. As I have shared with you before, I have a phobia about such things -- which might well be handled by prescription drugs too! -- so I have decided against this option for now.

Though I didn't get into it with either my doctor or counselor, there IS another reason for my reticence. Simply put, I don't trust Big Pharma! (Oh my, "trust" issues. Another symptom that a little pill could take care of!) The pharmaceutical industry always seems to be pushing drugs on the rest of us, not primarily out of a concern for our physical and/or mental health, but because it makes them insanely rich.

James Ridgeway recently addressed this topic in an article, Mass Psychosis in the US: How Big Pharma Hooked Americans on Drugs, posted at Common Dreams.

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of antipsychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed antipsychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in anti-psychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.

The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry's roster of psychotropic drugs - costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren't just for psychotics any more.

If at some juncture in my life I get to the point in which I can't discern the difference between my hallucinations and reality -- the chief difference between Schizotypal Personality Disorder and schizophrenia -- then I might need to revisit this issue. As it now stands, my hallucinations are annoyances and have not risen to the point in which I would be a danger to myself or others -- though I sometimes wonder.

But one of the things I worry about in regards to this massive increase in the use of antipsychotics is that the powers that be merely want to pacify the rest of us so that they can have a more docile population to manipulate. When a sicko world is looking hazy and groovy, citizens are a lot less likely to put a fight.

What's especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old - vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.

Who knows! One of these days -- hidden beneath the veil of health care reform -- the government might include a mandate for all of us to be fed drugs to keep us compliant. Hmm. Come to think of it, maybe that program already is underway.