CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS
“TIME-OUT” FOR ANTIDEPRESSANT DRUGS
Andrea
Yates, the Houston mother recently sentenced to life in prison for
drowning her five children in the bathtub, has become the latest horror
story in an alarming string of domestic atrocities occurring in the wake
of mental health drug treatment.From
the killer kids of Columbine, to the sickies of Springfield, Oregon, and
Santee, California, to U.S. Capitol cop-killer, Russell Eugene Weston,
runs an almost predictable pattern of antidepressant drug treatment (sometimes
coupled with other psychiatric drugs intended to counter the side-effects
of the first or to deal with other alleged mental illnesses), followed
by loss of impulse control.
Maybe
I’m missing the finer points of Mrs. Yates’ preparation for trial, but
does this make sense? Here’s a woman who methodically drowned all five
of her children, so doctors give her megadoses of psychiatric drugs until
she is sane enough to stand trial for murders she committed while
on megadoses of psychiatric drugs?If
she’s “sane” now, on the new drug regimen, how was anyone to know whether
she was sane thenon the
olddrug regimen?
I
mean, doesn’t this bring criminal justice to a whole new level?If
someone does something illegal — anything at all, like speeding — while
taking a prescription, psychotropic drug, couldn’t lawyers just argue that,
well, this person was prescribed thus-and-such drug by a doctor, and if
the judge will simply order a revised drug regimen, the accused would be
happy to drive down the same street again, at the posted speed limit.
Of
course, Mrs. Yates was said to be suffering from a particularly severe
form of post-partum depression.Some
hypothesized that her husband was partly to blame by keeping his wife continually
pregnant, resulting in physical and emotional exhaustion.Others
presumed some causal link between the “social isolation of home-schooling”
and the simultaneous stress of infant care.Yet
I could find no recorded incident of this magnitude in the days before
birth control, modern anesthetics, and “opportunities” for women — when
large families, long hours, and few amenities were the norm.Given
the money the Yates family spent on mental health treatment, including
on psychiatrist Muhammad Saaed and the various drugs prescribed over the
years, Mrs. Yates could have hired some help at home.She
could have had her “tubes tied” — a simple out-patient procedure — had
she been desperate to avoid further pregnancies.But
by all accounts, she loved her children and her husband dearly. Something
else had to be going on.
There
has been a shift in the ethical winds in the field of medicine.In
particular, psychotropic drugs do not appear to be held to the same standard
as other medications.Whether this
is due to profiteering by drug manufacturers or whether people have been
so taken in by promise of feel-good medications and insist upon having
them is unclear.What is clear
is that the safety criteria for mental-health products are not as rigorous
as for those aimed at physical well-being, like antibiotics and pain-killers.
Fifteen
years ago, I got a prescription pain-killer called Zomax following dental
surgery.It stopped the throbbing
immediately; didn’t make me sleepy, “spacey,” or nauseous; and wasn’t habit-forming.
Two years later, I was under the knife again for an abscessed tooth. I
expected another Zomax prescription. I was told it had been pulled from
the market.The substitute medication
I was given not only didn’t work but made me sick.Pacing
the floor with a throbbing jaw, I was furious.Why
did a perfectly good drug get pulled?
One
person apparently had died from it, my dentist said.
“One
person?” I spat.“One person, and
a drug line gets pulled?” That seemed a huge overreaction, until I thought
about it.I guess that’s why we
have a Food and Drug Administration.Only
in America would the death of one person warrant rethinking an entire product
line — except in the case of psychotropic drugs.
Of
course, one expects individual (“idiosyncratic”) reactions to most drugs.But
when the brain is the target of treatment, not only is the patient at risk
of adverse reactions, so is society.
There
are two schools of thought concerning the use of legal psychotropic drugs.One,
from the mental health industry, insists that troubled individuals who
see a psychiatrist and are prescribed drugs simply evidence their need
of them.The failure of the substances
in question to control violent impulses is viewed not as a failure of the
drugs per se but as a failure of society to impose mandatory early-detection
programs — for example, post-natal counseling for new mothers and behavioral
screening for schoolchildren — the way schools and insurance companies
demand physical examinations.
An
opposing view — increasingly prevalent among pediatricians, neurologists,
nutritionists and allergists — is that mood-altering drugs are insufficiently
tested and so unpredictable that they can push even normal adults over
the edge, not to mention troubled individuals and children.These
experts complain of pressure to attribute the physical complaints of patients
to mental causes whenever a diagnosis is elusive, time-consuming, or costly.
Ann
Blake Tracy, author and executive director of the International Coalition
for Drug Awareness, points to a whole new level of suicides in recent years
among patients prescribed antidepressants — not your typical sleeping pill,
wrist-slitting, carbon-monoxide variety, but grisly, masochistic methods
like dismemberment with a chain saw. While antidepressant drugs are not
supposed to be habit-forming, getting off of them, she says, frequently
results in “strange and terrible thoughts,” including suicide, lasting
long after the drug or drug cocktail is stopped.
Depression
and anger appear to be a particularly volatile mix.Both
tend to be treated with antidepressants on the theory that chronic anger
is a form of depression.But what
if anger and depression are not two sides of the same coin?Suppose
the worst possible thing an angry person could do is to take an antidepressant?It’s
certainly beginning to look that way, especially when combined with a powerful
antipsychotic drug such as Haldol, which was prescribed for Mrs. Yates.
Most
psychiatric drugs haven’t been around long enough to determine even the
short-term effects, much less long-term ones, a fact that’s obvious from
the pharmaceutical literature on antidepressant drugs.Yet
they are marketed for everything from compulsive shopping to discomfort
in crowds. Children are particularly vulnerable to side effects because
their brain circuitry and hormones are still developing. For example, if
some 90 percent of adults experience sexual dysfunction with drugs like
Prozac, Paxil and Luvox, what about adolescents and toddlers?
Columbine
killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were rumored to be either gay or
uninterested in dating and sex.Since
no one could fully confirm the conflicting rumors, they didn’t get much
press.But given the side-effect
of drugs like Prozac and Luvox, it would not be surprising to see sexual
confusion fluctuating between utter disinterest and hypersexuality.
Antidepressant
use, especially in children, has also been linked to the inability to enter
deep sleep. Sleep deprivation is known to produce paranoia, heightened
irritability (anger), and even psychotic outbreaks — one reason for its
use as a method of torture.
While
none of this entirely exempts anyone from responsibility for his own conduct
or that of family members who are on prescription drugs, it does, perhaps,
shed light on the grotesque (and even out-of-character) nature of the rampages
committed by individuals on antidepressants, especially in combination
with other psychotropic substances.
Researchers
are understandably anxious to be on the cutting edge of science, including
medicine.But today we see the merging
of social psychology — a controversial field notorious for its ambiguous
advice — with hard sciences such as biology and chemistry, in an effort
to alter human behavior and even personality. Everything possible is being
done to institutionalize this merger — from appealing, prime-time advertising
to legislation aimed at achieving parity between physical and mental-health
treatments. Difficult life experiences are deemed a disease.
Before
we travel too far down this road, maybe we need to stand back, take a deep
breath, and tell the officials at the FDA to take a page out of pop-psychology
texts:Maybe it’s time to declare
a “time out” for antidepressant drugs pending a more thorough investigation
of long-term side-effects and drug interactions.
B. K. Eakman, a former teacher turned speechwriter, is executive
director of the National Education Consortium and the author of
Cloning of the American Mind:˙ Eradicating Morality Through
Education.˙ (Huntington House)
