Rob: So I'm going to ask you...I'm going to do a station ID and when I get back I'm going to ask you about any effects that this has had on you.
RW: Okay.
Rob: Now, this is the Rob Kall Radio Show WNJC 1360 AM Washington Township. We're sponsored by futurehealth.org and opednews.com. If you want to go to listen to other podcasts or interviews that I've done, or you can't listen to all of this one, go to futurehealth.org/podcasts or opednews.com/podcasts and you'll see scores of other interviews that cover everything from health to politics to what's happening on the internet.
I'm interviewing now Robert Whitaker, he's the author of Anatomy of an Epidemic. The subtitle is Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. And it's a book, as I described earlier, that basically reports that long term findings show that psychiatric medications in the long run not only don't work, but they can kill you. Now I have to say, Robert, that I'm preparing to do another interview on a book called American Taliban by Markos Moulitsas, and he's basically there as describing how some people in the United States act like the Taliban act in Afghanistan -- and it crossed my mind that what we have here is a kind of a psychiatric Taliban when you have people saying...defending a drug that we now know increases the risk of suicide, saying if you don't take that drug you're going to increase a person's risk of suicide. If you have people saying 'people need to take this drug - it's like somebody who has diabetes needing insulin', when in effect, taking this drug is going to probably make them much more likely to be, for the rest of their lives disabled, decrease their life span by 15, 20 years -- this is a very scary, dangerous thing. In a sense you've got a group of people who have, in a sense, either massively maimed or killed -- directly or indirectly -- hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. Am I going too far?
RW: Well, let me (laughs)...you know, one of the things I've been trying to do as I've been talking about this is just say, here are the facts and people can make the conclusions as to the moral judgment of this whole thing, but two things -- and just in terms of the disability numbers, okay...we have something like 850 people per day in the United States -- adults -- going on disability now due to mental illness, and that's...let me go back to put this in context. From 1987...in 1987 we had 1.25 million people on government disability due to mental disorders/mental illness; then Prozac comes in and today we have more than 4 million people -- so the number of people on disability has tripled as we have embraced this paradigm of care in this use of drugs. So something is going horribly wrong. We're now getting the early deaths, as you say. Outcomes for bipolar illness have deteriorated dramatically. You will see for example, many people that use antidepressants now they'll have, sort of, eventually a bad reaction to the antidepressants and they'll move from the depression to the bipolar category -- that's the story of an iatrogenic, a drug cause deterioration.
So what I try to do is just say: Here are the facts, here's their science, and then you can sort of make the moral calculations as to, you know, how to describe this behavior. But what I think is important to make a distinction of -- you can have many psychiatrists working at a local level that are as betrayed by everybody else because they don't really know what the research shows -- it's really at these upper levels by people -- by doctors, psychiatrists, at the academic medical schools -- that have allowed themselves to be bought and once they've allowed themselves to be bought they tell false stories, and stories that do cover up harm done, and that is a betrayal of a remarkable sort.
And now let's jump, in a sense, into a moral dimension here -- we can talk about the moral quality...the moral act of medicating children that was done -- and you can trace this real clearly -- that what happens, starting in the early 1990s, is the pharmaceutical industry -- first they had their SSRI drugs, that's the antidepressants, and they start saying -- we need to expand the market, the use of these drugs into kids...okay, they were seen as a market; and they basically got together with academic psychiatrists to say this story -- Oh we are now discovering that children can, in fact, experience severe depressive episodes, or depressive episodes, and they need to be helped -- they need to be put on antidepressants. Well that was being done to sell the drug, and in fact, when they tested antidepressants in pediatric populations, they found the drug didn't even work over the short term...but did they tell that to the public? Did they publish that data in scientific journals? No, they hid that, and instead they kept saying these drugs are very safe and effective for kids -- that's a betrayal, okay...that's a big time betrayal. And now why are so many kids on atypical antipsychotics? Because once they came to market, the pharmaceutical companies said -- Aha, we need to expand our use of these drugs into the kids market...and basically then you had certain doctors being paid to expand that market, and I will give you an example. Joseph Biederman was the guy in 1995 who "discovers" juvenile bipolar illness. In other words, before, the thought was kids, say, under 14 years of age, they just couldn't develop bipolar illness. And so what...Biederman says -- Ah no, in fact I have discovered that you develop bipolar illness at about...when you're 3 or 4 years old. Now what happens when you find some of the documents that are being...going between Biederman and Jansen subsequently (Jansen is the maker of one of the atypical antipsychotics)? Well one, you see a lot of money flowing to Biederman, and we're talking in the millions of dollars; you'll see Biederman promising Jansen that (a) he will prove that his drug is safe and effective in kids, Risperdal; he actually promises to trash another atypical, Zyprexa -- in other words he's saying, 'I'll make it seem that we should only be prescribing Risperdal to these kids,' and he says, 'and I'll also do studies showing that these kids are going to be chronically ill and are going to need these drugs for life.' So what you really see here, if you really break this down, you see a process of expanding atypical antipsychotics into children with the thought that now (a) that will create a market for these drugs immediately, but will also put these kids on these drugs for life, okay? In other words, creating a lifelong user of psychiatric medication.
Rob: Wow.
RW: Yes, and...
Rob: This is documented...these correspondences are document?
RW: Yeah, I have this correspondence, and so...
Rob: But what's the website...is it on your website?
RW: No that part is not, but in fact it's even referred to in the book -- if you go through...I don't know what page it is...there's an excerpt from it in somewhat...I forget where it, what exactly...what page it's on, but you'll find at least a reference to it -- and he's basically saying I will create these patients for life for you. And then what happens later, Biederman is being questioned by a state attorney general relating to, sort of, the illegal marketing of these drugs and the state attorney general says to Biederman, 'So how did you come up with this new diagnosis? And Biederman says...and I could put up this documentation -- it's a lot -- but he says, 'I reconceptualized it -- I took what used to be called oppositional defiant disorder,' which means a kid who's like throwing a temper tantrum, 'and I said that was bipolar illness; and so I reconceptualized this old behavior into this new illness, which then got marketed as a brain disease that then became, of course, a reason for prescribing Risperdal.' And then the guy goes to him, the state attorney general goes to Biederman -- you know, what's your title at Harvard Medical School? He goes -- I'm a professor of psychiatry or whatever at Harvard Medical School. And then the state attorney general goes -- well what's above that? And he goes, 'God.' And the state attorney general said, 'Did you say God?' And Biederman says, 'Yes, I said God.' And actually what Biederman is doing there...he's playing God, because what he is doing is changing the lives of many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, hundreds of thousands of kids, and he's putting them on a path -- as long as we talk about the moral dimensions of this -- well (a) their frontal lobes will shrink within a course of the next...the first year on the medication. What the data show is that as you're on...
Rob: Wait, let's just point out that the frontal lobes are the part of the brain that handle the executive functions, the part where people mature and turn into responsible adults.
RW: That's right, and it's also the part of the brain that separates us from, you know, primates. I mean, it's a part that makes us most human, that enables us to be really fully conscious of ourselves and worry about the future, etcetera. So yeah, it is the part of the brain we most want to protect.
But you'll get some shrinkage there. Research done by Nancy Andreasen has shown that this shrinkage continues as you're on the brain...on the drugs. She has shown that by 5 years on the brain...as the shrinkage begins to correlate with a significant decline in cognitive function. You do see Tardive Dyskinesia in kids on these atypical antipsychotics...I think the rate is something like 4 percent a year. That means that their basal ganglia is being damaged, and often it means that it's being permanently damaged -- so we're talking about permanent damage to the part of the brain that controls motor movements. Then you've got to ask -- and you'll get these kids that'll have diabetes, they'll have cholesterol problems, they'll become obese, they'll become lethargic, they can't feel the world as much -- and then you've got to ask how long can we expect that kid -- who is age 4 or 5 and put on an atypical antipsychotic -- well, how long can we expect them to live? Now your ex-wife, I think you said she was on the drugs for about 15 years...
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