Rob: See I take that really serious...
RW: ...and you'll see brain damage, you'll see cognitive decline with the antipsychotics, but you'll see cognitive decline a little bit with the antidepressants; you'll definitely see a lot with the benzodiazepines. So really I guess, you know, Rob...to sort of...one...in a sense what you see with these medications is this, in a big picture way...and actually what I do do is what you say -- I first try to flush out what's the natural spectrum of these disorders, and it turns out the people often...they would more flu like -- people might have a bout of mania, a bout of depression, they'd get better and they'd -- I'm talking about in the pre-drug era days, and they'd get better -- now they get stuck much more in this sort of chronic condition. But really what you have to see is...if you really look at the science is that these are agents that are, sort of, perturb normal functioning in the brain -- they're not fixing any chemical imbalance. And once you understand that they're perturbing normal function and the brain is trying to compensate and adapt to this sort of interruption in normal functioning, you begin to understand why the side effects are bad, the psychiatric side effects can be bad, and you know, you are talking...what happens is when you pull yourself back and let's say manic depressive illness, which is now known as bipolar illness -- so we...50 years ago, 40 years ago that was a rare disease...okay, a rare disorder, right? In other words it was like 1 in 5,000 people and the outcomes were pretty good. There was no long term cognitive decline, 70 to 85 percent of people worked, they might have an episode of mania or an episode of depression, but then it would pass and they'd go back to sort of what they call euthymia, an absence of symptoms, then go back to, you know, functioning well. Well what happens to bipolar patients today? Well now, what you see, is often they're on a cocktail of drugs, often they have poor physical health, they're much more symptomatic, they have...they're much more likely to be rapid cyclers, suffer from a lot of depression, suffer some physical problems, after about 5 years they start showing cognitive decline, only about 33 percent are working as opposed to 85 percent, and you do see the early death...and by the way, the early death thing that is really appearing now, which showed up with the atypical antipsychotics in big form -- we're just at the first wave of this. So there was a report saying -- Oh my goodness, these people are now dying at age 56; well I know a new study that's being done and they're finding among people who've died the average age is 46...and what's going to happen to these kids being put on these drugs? How long are they going to live? So you've sort of opened up a...you've really jumped into, with your opening questions here, a really big fundamental question and that is...do we have this form of care...so-called care...but anyway, do we have these medications that are, you know, making people disabled and, you know, poor physical health leading to early death? And if so, it is one of the...and that's in fact what the facts do show...that their own...the science done by the NIMH and all shows, and as such it's really a...it's an extraordinary medical misadventure that is harming many, many, many, many people -- and we're talking millions of people.
Rob: Extraordinary medical misadventure.
RW: I'm putting it kindly, but yes.
Rob: Now, I want to...
RW: And by the way we can talk about the kids a second, but once you get into kids it's even beyond the medical misadventure, but go ahead.
Rob: We're going. First I want to say what I was trying to say that I didn't...I failed to interrupt you is I take this personal because my ex-wife died this summer at 56 from the diseases that you describe in your book at the kind of things that appear from taking these medications -- diabetes, heart disease, liver problems -- she had all of them. And she went through a horrible death.
RW: How long had she...right. How long had she been on psychiatric medications?
Rob: Oh, probably 15 years.
RW: Well, Rob, first of all I'm sorry for your loss and it is a horrible death, and that's the amazing thing -- 15, 20 years...the poor physical health that you see set in...and by the way sometimes it doesn't take 15 or 20 years for the physical health to set in -- you'll see people sometimes within a year or two just really having health problems. But long term you'll see people stop...you know, they gain so much weight, they have the diabetes, you'll see them using canes earlier ages...
Rob: All that.
RW: Yeah, it's really remarkable.
Rob: All of that, yes. Now you talk about this new kind of medication...what's the word? The atypical antipsychotics -- what are they?
RW: Well yeah, so they're sort of a marketing invention but here's what I mean by this. There was what's called the first generation of antipsychotic medications, and that was Thorazine and Haldol and the old "standard neuroleptics." And those drugs were known by the psychiatric community, by the medical community to be really, sort of, problematic drugs that you, supposedly, were only supposed to use them when people were severely ill, etcetera, with psychotic symptoms; and it was understood that these drugs could cause Tardive Dyskinesia. Tardive Dyskinesia is when your basal ganglia is basically damaged so you can no longer control motor movements...that sort of thing.
Rob: And that would include drooling and ticks and things like that.
RW: That's right, you might see...yeah, all those. And you might see a person's tongue darting out real regularly as if they can't stop their tongue, and it's more than just ticks -- with severe Tardive Dyskinesia you might have trouble walking, you might have trouble eating, you might have trouble holding pens...I mean it just depends on the severity of the Tardive Dyskinesia, but it's a sign that your basal ganglia is being damaged and you're losing motor control.
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